Kearney, NE has a C safety grade (56/100) with a violent crime rate of 301 per 100,000, 14% below the national average.
FBI UCR 2024 · per-capita rates · mid-size city
Kearney (34,525 people) sits in the mid-size municipal band. This page opens with per-100,000 FBI UCR rates, then NE and national benchmarks.
Data updated 2026-08-24
Kearney, NE carries a PlainCrime C safety grade with violent crime 14% below the U.S. average
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program for 2024, Kearney, NE shows violent crime at 301.2 per 100,000 residents and property crime at 1,624.9 per 100,000. Violent crime runs 14% below the U.S. average. PlainCrime assigns grade C from those rates. Figures are voluntary agency submissions joined to population denominators; incomplete coverage can move the number.
Comparable rate records
The nearest comparable 2024 records to Kearney's 301.2 violent-crime rate per 100,000 are Hastings (318.4), Waterloo (332.2), Lincoln (347.9), Alliance (236.8). 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 301.2 reported violent offenses per 100,000 residents in 2024, Kearney ranks 8 of 47 — above 39 of the 46 other Nebraska cities whose 2024 submission passes this site’s completeness test. That is +142.4% against the cohort median of 124.3. Cities that did not report, or that reported implausibly low totals, are excluded from this cohort rather than counted as low-crime.
2020–2024 direction
Across 5 comparable reporting years, the rate moved from 362.6 per 100,000 in 2020 to 301.2 in 2024 (-16.9%). The highest observed value was 362.6 in 2020 and the lowest 283.4 in 2021. Years whose submission failed the completeness test are left out of this comparison rather than plotted as change.
Offense mix
Violent offenses are 15.6% of the 665 Part I offenses reported in Kearney for 2024, against a median of 10.7% across comparable Nebraska cities — a gap of 4.9 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 counts dominate Kearney'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 15 Census sq mi, Kearney logged 37.3 property and 6.9 violent offenses per square mile in 2024.
Kearney's 2024 book concentrates in larceny-theft (70% of 665 offenses; mix index 5,135).
Violent offenses are 16% of the municipal total; property offenses still dominate the count.
Kearney offense mix (2024)
Density uses Census Gazetteer land area (15 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 | 561 | 1624.9 |
| Larceny-Theft | 466 | 1349.7 |
| Burglary | 58 | 168 |
| Motor Vehicle Theft | 37 | 107.2 |
| Arson | 4 | 11.6 |
| Violent Crime | 104 | 301.2 |
| Aggravated Assault | 63 | 182.5 |
| Rape | 34 | 98.5 |
| Robbery | 6 | 17.4 |
| Murder | 1 | 2.9 |
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 | 34,201 | 362.6 | 2005.8 |
| 2021 | Comparable | 34,576 | 283.4 | 1203.1 |
| 2022 | Comparable | 34,186 | 345.2 | 1614.7 |
| 2023 | Comparable | 34,486 | 304.5 | 1855.8 |
| 2024 | Comparable | 34,525 | 301.2 | 1624.9 |
Kearney Police Department filed the 2024 UCR row behind Kearney's 665 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 Nebraska cities closest to Kearney in population. Their populations run from 16,205 to 52,488, against 34,525 here. Or use our side-by-side compare tool to benchmark two cities directly.
Kearney sits at 301.2/100K violent (grade C); the Nebraska cities below are the nearest matches after size peers are removed.
Kearney at 301.2/100K violent and 1,624.9/100K property - matched below outside Nebraska (≥10k pop, latest UCR vintage; not the in-state lists above).
301.2/100K here; nearest out-of-state matches.
1,624.9/100K here; violent-rate peers above excluded.
Out-of-state cities whose violent rate moved a similar share from 2023→2024 (-1.1% here); level-based peers above are excluded.
In 2024, Kearney reported 104 violent crimes and 561 property crimes, for a total of 665 reported offenses.
From 2023 to 2024, Kearney's violent crime rate decreased by 1.1%, and the property crime rate decreased by 12.4%.
The most common crime type in Kearney is larceny-theft, accounting for 70.1% of all reported crimes (466 incidents in 2024).
Mid-size read: Kearney 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 Kearney's mid-size city row is sourced and ranked.
Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program CIUS Table 8 municipal crime rates · 2024 Kearney, NE 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. Kearney is scored in the mid-size municipal band (34,525 on the row). See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.