Rock Falls, IL has a F safety grade (15/100) with a violent crime rate of 597 per 100,000, 70% above the national average.
FBI UCR 2024 · per-capita rates · small city
Rock Falls is a small municipal reporter (8,545 on the UCR row). Per-100,000 violent and property rates are shown with IL and U.S. context.
Data updated 2026-09-05
Rock Falls, IL is among the highest-crime cities in the country, and earns an F PlainCrime safety grade, where violent crime runs 70% above the U.S. average
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program for 2024, Rock Falls, IL shows violent crime at 596.8 per 100,000 residents and property crime at 2,972.5 per 100,000. Violent crime runs 70% 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 596.8 reported violent offenses per 100,000 residents in 2024, Rock Falls ranks 19 of 506 — above 487 of the 505 other Illinois cities whose 2024 submission passes this site’s completeness test. That is +498.8% against the cohort median of 99.7. 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 369.1 per 100,000 in 2020 to 596.8 in 2024 (+61.7%). The highest observed value was 596.8 in 2024 and the lowest 23.3 in 2021. 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 Rock Falls's 596.8 violent-crime rate per 100,000 are Decatur (602.1), Eldorado (589.1), Paris (577.4), Granite City (617.8). 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 16.7% of the 305 Part I offenses reported in Rock Falls for 2024, against a median of 11.2% across comparable Illinois cities — a gap of 5.5 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 Rock Falls'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 4 Census sq mi, Rock Falls logged 63.8 property and 12.8 violent offenses per square mile in 2024.
Rock Falls's 2024 book concentrates in larceny-theft (62% of 305 offenses; mix index 4,201).
Violent offenses are 17% of the municipal total; property offenses still dominate the count.
Rock Falls offense mix (2024)
Density uses Census Gazetteer land area (4 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 | 254 | 2972.5 |
| Larceny-Theft | 188 | 2200.1 |
| Burglary | 46 | 538.3 |
| Motor Vehicle Theft | 20 | 234.1 |
| Arson | 1 | 11.7 |
| Violent Crime | 51 | 596.8 |
| Aggravated Assault | 32 | 374.5 |
| Rape | 13 | 152.1 |
| Robbery | 5 | 58.5 |
| Murder | 1 | 11.7 |
The chart omits 2021 rather than drawing an unsupported zero or partial-coverage dip. The table preserves the year and marks the gap.
Lead series · fell across 4 comparable years · FBI UCR
Secondary series · rose · 2020-2024 · FBI UCR
| Year | Coverage | Population | Violent Rate | Property Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Comparable | 8,670 | 369.1 | 4406 |
| 2021 | Insufficient reporting | 8,577 | - | - |
| 2022 | Comparable | 8,687 | 506.5 | 2762.7 |
| 2023 | Comparable | 8,546 | 503.2 | 2328.6 |
| 2024 | Comparable | 8,545 | 596.8 | 2972.5 |
Rock Falls Police Department filed the 2024 UCR row behind Rock Falls's 305 reported offenses (4-year span 2020-2024, with internal gaps).
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 Illinois cities closest to Rock Falls in population. Their populations run from 8,336 to 8,710, against 8,545 here. Or use our side-by-side compare tool to benchmark two cities directly.
Rock Falls sits at 596.8/100K violent (grade F); the Illinois cities below are the nearest matches after size peers are removed.
In 2024, Rock Falls reported 51 violent crimes and 254 property crimes, for a total of 305 reported offenses.
From 2023 to 2024, Rock Falls's violent crime rate increased by 18.6%, and the property crime rate increased by 27.7%.
The most common crime type in Rock Falls is larceny-theft, accounting for 61.6% of all reported crimes (188 incidents in 2024).
Small-city read: Rock Falls 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 Rock Falls's small city row is sourced and ranked.
Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program CIUS Table 8 municipal crime rates · 2024 Rock Falls, IL rates use the reporting-year population on the municipal row.
Bulk download: city crime dataset (CSV/JSON)
Put this to use
Put the Rock Falls, IL FBI UCR record to work: compare peers, open the state atlas, or look up another city.
A citywide UCR rate is a starting point, not a neighbourhood verdict: read the full profile and the year coverage notes before drawing conclusions.
Every figure on PlainCrime is rendered directly from FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) source data, no number is typed in by an editor. Rock Falls is scored as a small-city UCR reporter (8,545 on the row). See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.