Hot Springs, SD has a A safety grade (81/100) with a violent crime rate of 190 per 100,000, 46% below the national average.
FBI UCR 2024 · per-capita rates · small city
Hot Springs is a small municipal reporter (3,686 on the UCR row). Per-100,000 violent and property rates are shown with SD and U.S. context.
Data updated 2026-08-24
Hot Springs, SD carries a PlainCrime A safety grade with violent crime 46% below the U.S. average
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program for 2024, Hot Springs, SD shows violent crime at 189.9 per 100,000 residents and property crime at 27.1 per 100,000. Violent crime runs 46% below the U.S. average. PlainCrime assigns grade A from those rates. Figures are voluntary agency submissions joined to population denominators; incomplete coverage can move the number.
Offense mix
Violent offenses are 87.5% of the 8 Part I offenses reported in Hot Springs for 2024, against a median of 15.9% across comparable South Dakota cities — a gap of 71.6 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 0.0% of reported property offenses in Hot Springs, against a cohort median of 79.4%. The remainder is burglary (1) and motor vehicle theft (0). Composition differences of this size usually track what kinds of places and property are present in a jurisdiction.
Small-count caution
Hot Springs reported 7 violent offences in 2024 against a population of 3,686. At this volume one additional or one fewer report moves the per-100,000 rate noticeably, so the figure is better read as a data point than as a precise measurement, and year-to-year swings here are expected.
2020–2024 direction
Across 5 comparable reporting years, the rate moved from 402.6 per 100,000 in 2020 to 189.9 in 2024 (-52.8%). The highest observed value was 402.6 in 2020 and the lowest 81.2 in 2023. Years whose submission failed the completeness test are left out of this comparison rather than plotted as change.
Comparable rate records
The nearest comparable 2024 records to Hot Springs's 189.9 violent-crime rate per 100,000 are Beresford (192.4), North Sioux City (196.8), Vermillion (181.7), Burke (173.3). 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.
Position in the state cohort
At 189.9 reported violent offenses per 100,000 residents in 2024, Hot Springs ranks 22 of 39 — above 17 of the 38 other South Dakota cities whose 2024 submission passes this site’s completeness test. That is -6.1% against the cohort median of 202.3. Cities that did not report, or that reported implausibly low totals, are excluded from this cohort rather than counted as low-crime.
Violent counts are the sharper signal on Hot Springs's FBI UCR Table 8 municipal row. Per-100,000 rates use the reporting-year population on that row; incomplete reporters stay out of rate rankings. A citywide figure rarely describes any single neighbourhood inside the municipal boundary.
Based on 7 reported violent incidents in a population of 3,686. At this volume, one additional or one fewer report can shift the rate and letter grade noticeably; small-city crime counts are inherently more volatile year to year than large-city counts, so treat this grade as a data point, not a precise ranking.
Small-city offense counts above are voluntary UCR submissions, not neighbourhood advice. Year-to-year swings can look large when the population base is modest.
Across 4.3 Census sq mi, Hot Springs logged 0.2 property and 1.6 violent offenses per square mile in 2024.
Hot Springs's 2024 book concentrates in aggravated assault (88% of 8 offenses; mix index 7,813).
Violent offenses are 88% of the municipal total - a violence-heavy book for a small city.
Hot Springs offense mix (2024)
Density uses Census Gazetteer land area (4.3 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Violent Crime | 7 | 189.9 |
| Aggravated Assault | 7 | 189.9 |
| Murder | 0 | 0 |
| Rape | 0 | 0 |
| Robbery | 0 | 0 |
| Property Crime | 1 | 27.1 |
| Burglary | 1 | 27.1 |
| Larceny-Theft | 0 | 0 |
| Motor Vehicle Theft | 0 | 0 |
| Arson | 0 | 0 |
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 | 3,477 | 402.6 | 373.9 |
| 2021 | Comparable | 3,479 | 402.4 | 546.1 |
| 2022 | Comparable | 3,605 | 277.4 | 194.2 |
| 2023 | Comparable | 3,694 | 81.2 | 243.6 |
| 2024 | Comparable | 3,686 | 189.9 | 27.1 |
Hot Springs Police Department filed the 2024 UCR row behind Hot Springs's 8 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 South Dakota cities closest to Hot Springs in population. Their populations run from 2,401 to 3,217, against 3,686 here. Or use our side-by-side compare tool to benchmark two cities directly.
In 2024, Hot Springs reported 7 violent crimes and 1 property crimes, for a total of 8 reported offenses.
From 2023 to 2024, Hot Springs's violent crime rate increased by 133.9%, and the property crime rate decreased by 88.9%.
The most common crime type in Hot Springs is aggravated assault, accounting for 87.5% of all reported crimes (7 incidents in 2024).
Small-city read: Hot Springs is sourced from FBI UCR Table 8 for 2024; rates use that row's population.
Small-city rows use the same per-100,000 formula; a few unreported years can leave gaps in the trend table. Verify the agency's submission on FBI.gov UCR.
Disclaimer (small city): UCR counts here are informational only. They are not a victimization probability. Source: FBI UCR Program.
Small-city rate methodology for how Hot Springs's small city row is sourced and ranked.
Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program CIUS Table 8 municipal crime rates · 2024 Hot Springs, SD 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. Hot Springs is scored as a small-city UCR reporter (3,686 on the row). See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.