Plainfield, NJ has a C safety grade (45/100) with a violent crime rate of 411 per 100,000, 17% above the national average.
At 55,975 residents, Plainfield is a large city: FBI UCR Table 8 rates (per 100,000) here are read against NJ and U.S. averages before the offense-family breakdown.
Plainfield, NJ carries a PlainCrime C safety grade with violent crime 17% above the U.S. average
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program for 2024, Plainfield, NJ shows violent crime at 410.9 per 100,000 residents and property crime at 1,609.6 per 100,000. Violent crime runs 17% above 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.
The verdict
Plainfield earns a C safety grade: violent crime runs 17% above the U.S. average, placing it among the highest-crime cities in the country.
Position in the state cohort
At 410.9 reported violent offenses per 100,000 residents in 2024, Plainfield ranks 21 of 417 — above 396 of the 416 other New Jersey cities whose 2024 submission passes this site’s completeness test. That is +503.0% against the cohort median of 68.1. 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 Plainfield's 410.9 violent-crime rate per 100,000 are Elizabeth (408.7), Pleasantville (402.5), Lindenwold (401.2), Perth Amboy (391.8). 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.
Offense mix
Violent offenses are 20.3% of the 1,131 Part I offenses reported in Plainfield for 2024, against a median of 7.1% across comparable New Jersey cities — a gap of 13.2 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.
2020–2024 direction
Across 5 comparable reporting years, the rate moved from 453.0 per 100,000 in 2020 to 410.9 in 2024 (-9.3%). The highest observed value was 688.2 in 2021 and the lowest 410.9 in 2024. Years whose submission failed the completeness test are left out of this comparison rather than plotted as change.
Property counts dominate Plainfield'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.
On a large city row, these are citywide reported offense totals - not neighbourhood advice. Conditions vary by place and time; reporting rates differ across jurisdictions.
| Offense | Count | Rate /100K |
|---|---|---|
| Property Crime | 901 | 1609.6 |
| Larceny-Theft | 753 | 1345.2 |
| Burglary | 76 | 135.8 |
| Motor Vehicle Theft | 72 | 128.6 |
| Arson | 1 | 1.8 |
| Violent Crime | 230 | 410.9 |
| Aggravated Assault | 164 | 293 |
| Robbery | 58 | 103.6 |
| Rape | 8 | 14.3 |
| Murder | 0 | 0 |
Lead series · rose across 5 comparable years · FBI UCR
Secondary series · fell · 2020-2024 · FBI UCR
| Year | Coverage | Population | Violent Rate | Property Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Comparable | 50,333 | 453 | 1462.3 |
| 2021 | Comparable | 52,163 | 688.2 | 1397.5 |
| 2022 | Comparable | 55,494 | 452.3 | 1320.9 |
| 2023 | Comparable | 54,791 | 523.8 | 1684.6 |
| 2024 | Comparable | 55,975 | 410.9 | 1609.6 |
Plainfield's crime figures on this page originate from Plainfield Police Department's submission to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program.
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 New Jersey cities closest to Plainfield in population. Their populations run from 53,295 to 59,532, against 55,975 here. Or use our side-by-side compare tool to benchmark two cities directly.
These New Jersey cities report the closest violent-crime rates to Plainfield's 410.9/100K (same FBI UCR vintage rules; size peers above are excluded so the two lists stay distinct).
Large-city read: Plainfield's rates come from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, CIUS Table 8, vintage 2024.
Incomplete reporters stay out of rate rankings. Cross-check population with Census ACS; state UCR programs for statewide context. Primary verify links: FBI.gov UCR, Census QuickFacts.
Disclaimer (large city): informational crime rates only - not legal, insurance, or personal-safety advice. Source: FBI UCR. Ask a qualified professional before acting.
Large-city rate methodology for how Plainfield's large city row is sourced and ranked.
Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program CIUS Table 8 municipal crime rates · 2024 Plainfield, NJ 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. Plainfield is scored here as a large city UCR reporter (55,975 on the row). See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.