Needles, CA has a F safety grade (9/100) with a violent crime rate of 919 per 100,000, 161% above the national average.
FBI UCR 2024 · per-capita rates · small city
Needles is a small municipal reporter (4,790 on the UCR row). Per-100,000 violent and property rates are shown with CA and U.S. context.
Data updated 2026-08-24
Needles, CA carries a PlainCrime F safety grade with violent crime 161% above the U.S. average
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program for 2024, Needles, CA shows violent crime at 918.6 per 100,000 residents and property crime at 2,359.1 per 100,000. Violent crime runs 161% above the U.S. average. PlainCrime assigns grade F from those rates. Figures are voluntary agency submissions joined to population denominators; incomplete coverage can move the number.
Position in the state cohort
At 918.6 reported violent offenses per 100,000 residents in 2024, Needles ranks 24 of 458 — above 434 of the 457 other California cities whose 2024 submission passes this site’s completeness test. That is +179.6% against the cohort median of 328.5. 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 Needles's 918.6 violent-crime rate per 100,000 are Sonora (920.4), Bishop (915.2), Richmond (923.1), Signal Hill (912.5). 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.
2020–2024 direction
Across 5 comparable reporting years, the rate moved from 1602.6 per 100,000 in 2020 to 918.6 in 2024 (-42.7%). The highest observed value was 1864.8 in 2022 and the lowest 0.0 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 28.0% of the 157 Part I offenses reported in Needles for 2024, against a median of 17.1% across comparable California cities — a gap of 10.9 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-offense composition
Larceny-theft is 47.8% of reported property offenses in Needles, against a cohort median of 69.5%. The remainder is burglary (30) and motor vehicle theft (29). Composition differences of this size usually track what kinds of places and property are present in a jurisdiction.
Property counts dominate Needles'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.
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 30.6 Census sq mi, Needles logged 3.7 property and 1.4 violent offenses per square mile in 2024.
Needles's 8 active offense types stay diversified (mix index 2,320); larceny-theft still leads at 34%.
Violent offenses are 28% of the municipal total; property offenses still dominate the count.
Needles offense mix (2024)
Density uses Census Gazetteer land area (30.6 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 | 113 | 2359.1 |
| Larceny-Theft | 54 | 1127.3 |
| Burglary | 30 | 626.3 |
| Motor Vehicle Theft | 29 | 605.4 |
| Arson | 5 | 104.4 |
| Violent Crime | 44 | 918.6 |
| Aggravated Assault | 31 | 647.2 |
| Rape | 7 | 146.1 |
| Robbery | 5 | 104.4 |
| Murder | 1 | 20.9 |
The chart omits 2021, 2023 rather than drawing an unsupported zero or partial-coverage dip. The table preserves the year and marks the gap.
Lead series · rose across 3 comparable years · FBI UCR
Secondary series · fell · 2020-2024 · FBI UCR
| Year | Coverage | Population | Violent Rate | Property Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Comparable | 4,992 | 1602.6 | 2283.7 |
| 2021 | Insufficient reporting | 4,953 | - | - |
| 2022 | Comparable | 4,880 | 1864.8 | 2438.5 |
| 2023 | Insufficient reporting | 4,827 | - | - |
| 2024 | Comparable | 4,790 | 918.6 | 2359.1 |
Needles Police Department filed the 2024 UCR row behind Needles's 157 reported offenses (3-year span 2020-2024, with internal gaps).
This agency reports via the traditional Summary Reporting System (SRS): aggregate monthly offense counts rather than incident-level detail.
Crime rates read differently at different scales, so these are the California cities closest to Needles in population. Their populations run from 4,413 to 5,005, against 4,790 here. Or use our side-by-side compare tool to benchmark two cities directly.
Needles sits at 918.6/100K violent (grade F); the California cities below are the nearest matches after size peers are removed.
In 2024, Needles reported 44 violent crimes and 113 property crimes, for a total of 157 reported offenses.
From 2023 to 2024, Needles's violent crime rate increased by 111.1%, and the property crime rate increased by 114.9%.
The most common crime type in Needles is larceny-theft, accounting for 34.4% of all reported crimes (54 incidents in 2024).
Small-city read: Needles 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 Needles's small city row is sourced and ranked.
Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program CIUS Table 8 municipal crime rates · 2024 Needles, CA 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. Needles is scored as a small-city UCR reporter (4,790 on the row). See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.