Garden City, KS has a D safety grade (31/100) with a violent crime rate of 512 per 100,000, 45% above the national average.
FBI UCR 2024 · per-capita rates · mid-size city
Garden City (27,156 people) sits in the mid-size municipal band. This page opens with per-100,000 FBI UCR rates, then KS and national benchmarks.
Data updated 2026-08-24
Garden City, KS carries a PlainCrime D safety grade with violent crime 45% above the U.S. average
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program for 2024, Garden City, KS shows violent crime at 511.9 per 100,000 residents and property crime at 2,080.6 per 100,000. Violent crime runs 45% above the U.S. average. PlainCrime assigns grade D from those rates. Figures are voluntary agency submissions joined to population denominators; incomplete coverage can move the number.
Position in the state cohort
At 511.9 reported violent offenses per 100,000 residents in 2024, Garden City ranks 17 of 125 — above 108 of the 124 other Kansas cities whose 2024 submission passes this site’s completeness test. That is +169.8% against the cohort median of 189.7. Cities that did not report, or that reported implausibly low totals, are excluded from this cohort rather than counted as low-crime.
Comparable rate records
The nearest comparable 2024 records to Garden City's 511.9 violent-crime rate per 100,000 are Independence (522.0), Concordia (522.4), Oberlin (501.3), Chanute (525.2). These are same-year agency submissions that pass the same completeness screen, not a claim that the cities have identical conditions. They make the cohort position above checkable against named records instead of a generic state average.
Offense mix
Violent offenses are 19.7% of the 704 Part I offenses reported in Garden City for 2024, against a median of 13.8% across comparable Kansas cities — a gap of 6.0 points. Offense mix is shaped by which agencies report and how incidents are classified as well as by the underlying offenses, so it describes the reported record rather than a settled difference in conditions.
Property-offense composition
Larceny-theft is 85.5% of reported property offenses in Garden City, against a cohort median of 76.7%. The remainder is burglary (42) and motor vehicle theft (40). Composition differences of this size usually track what kinds of places and property are present in a jurisdiction.
2020–2024 direction
Across 5 comparable reporting years, the rate moved from 538.7 per 100,000 in 2020 to 511.9 in 2024 (-5.0%). The highest observed value was 584.8 in 2022 and the lowest 511.9 in 2024. Years whose submission failed the completeness test are left out of this comparison rather than plotted as change.
Property counts dominate Garden City's FBI UCR Table 8 municipal row. Per-100,000 rates use the reporting-year population on that row; cities that fail the completeness test stay out of rate rankings. A citywide figure rarely describes any single neighbourhood inside the municipal boundary.
Mid-size municipal totals above are reported offenses, not safety advice for any single block. Reporting completeness still varies by year and agency.
Across 11.2 Census sq mi, Garden City logged 50.4 property and 12.4 violent offenses per square mile in 2024.
Garden City's 2024 book concentrates in larceny-theft (69% of 704 offenses; mix index 5,016).
Violent offenses are 20% of the municipal total; property offenses still dominate the count.
Garden City offense mix (2024)
Density uses Census Gazetteer land area (11.2 sq mi); mix index is HHI x 10,000 on the offense-type shares above. Distinct from the per-100K rates in the hero.
| Offense | Count | Rate /100K |
|---|---|---|
| Property Crime | 565 | 2080.6 |
| Larceny-Theft | 483 | 1778.6 |
| Burglary | 42 | 154.7 |
| Motor Vehicle Theft | 40 | 147.3 |
| Arson | 3 | 11 |
| Violent Crime | 139 | 511.9 |
| Aggravated Assault | 107 | 394 |
| Rape | 16 | 58.9 |
| Robbery | 15 | 55.2 |
| Murder | 1 | 3.7 |
Lead series · fell across 5 comparable years · FBI UCR
Secondary series · fell · 2020-2024 · FBI UCR
| Year | Coverage | Population | Violent Rate | Property Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Comparable | 26,360 | 538.7 | 3497.7 |
| 2021 | Comparable | 25,920 | 571 | 3518.5 |
| 2022 | Comparable | 27,701 | 584.8 | 2606.4 |
| 2023 | Comparable | 27,269 | 583.1 | 2574.4 |
| 2024 | Comparable | 27,156 | 511.9 | 2080.6 |
Garden City Police Department filed the 2024 UCR row behind Garden City's 704 reported offenses (5-year span 2020-2024).
This agency reports via NIBRS, the incident-based system that captures more detail per offense (multiple crimes per incident, victim/offender data) than the older summary counts.
Crime rates read differently at different scales, so these are the Kansas cities closest to Garden City in population. Their populations run from 20,465 to 34,010, against 27,156 here. Or use our side-by-side compare tool to benchmark two cities directly.
Garden City sits at 511.9/100K violent (grade D); the Kansas cities below are the nearest matches after size peers are removed.
Garden City at 511.9/100K violent and 2,080.6/100K property - matched below outside Kansas (≥10k pop, latest UCR vintage; not the in-state lists above).
511.9/100K here; nearest out-of-state matches.
2,080.6/100K here; violent-rate peers above excluded.
Out-of-state cities whose violent rate moved a similar share from 2023→2024 (-12.2% here); level-based peers above are excluded.
In 2024, Garden City reported 139 violent crimes and 565 property crimes, for a total of 704 reported offenses.
From 2023 to 2024, Garden City's violent crime rate decreased by 12.2%, and the property crime rate decreased by 19.2%.
The most common crime type in Garden City is larceny-theft, accounting for 68.6% of all reported crimes (483 incidents in 2024).
Mid-size read: Garden City figures are FBI UCR CIUS Table 8 (vintage 2024), population-adjusted per 100,000.
Denominators are the reporting-year population on the municipal row. Incomplete years are dropped from rankings. Confirm at FBI Crime Data Explorer and Census.gov QuickFacts.
Disclaimer (mid-size municipal): figures are informational, not advice. FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program is the source. Consult a professional before decisions.
Mid-size rate methodology for how Garden City's mid-size city row is sourced and ranked.
Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program CIUS Table 8 municipal crime rates · 2024 Garden City, KS rates use the reporting-year population on the municipal row.
Bulk download: city crime dataset (CSV/JSON)
Every figure on PlainCrime is rendered directly from FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) source data, no number is typed in by an editor. Garden City is scored in the mid-size municipal band (27,156 on the row). See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.