Sheffield, AL has a D safety grade (32/100) with a violent crime rate of 517 per 100,000, 47% above the national average.
FBI UCR 2024 · per-capita rates · small city
Sheffield is a small municipal reporter (9,280 on the UCR row). Per-100,000 violent and property rates are shown with AL and U.S. context.
Data updated 2026-08-24
Sheffield, AL carries a PlainCrime D safety grade with violent crime 47% above the U.S. average
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program for 2024, Sheffield, AL shows violent crime at 517.2 per 100,000 residents and property crime at 1,896.6 per 100,000. Violent crime runs 47% above the U.S. average. PlainCrime assigns grade D from those rates. Figures are voluntary agency submissions joined to population denominators; incomplete coverage can move the number.
2020–2024 direction
Across 5 comparable reporting years, the rate moved from 123.8 per 100,000 in 2020 to 517.2 in 2024 (+317.8%). The highest observed value was 517.2 in 2024 and the lowest 10.8 in 2022. 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 Sheffield's 517.2 violent-crime rate per 100,000 are Elberta (512.8), Hueytown (512.1), Ashville (496.5), Talladega (541.5). 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.
Position in the state cohort
At 517.2 reported violent offenses per 100,000 residents in 2024, Sheffield ranks 60 of 263 — above 203 of the 262 other Alabama cities whose 2024 submission passes this site’s completeness test. That is +142.2% against the cohort median of 213.5. Cities that did not report, or that reported implausibly low totals, are excluded from this cohort rather than counted as low-crime.
Offense mix
Violent offenses are 21.4% of the 224 Part I offenses reported in Sheffield for 2024, against a median of 13.8% across comparable Alabama cities — a gap of 7.6 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 counts dominate Sheffield'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 7 Census sq mi, Sheffield logged 25.2 property and 6.9 violent offenses per square mile in 2024.
Sheffield leans on larceny-theft at 56% of reported offenses, with a moderate mix index of 3,807.
Violent offenses are 21% of the municipal total; property offenses still dominate the count.
Sheffield offense mix (2024)
Density uses Census Gazetteer land area (7 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 | 176 | 1896.6 |
| Larceny-Theft | 126 | 1357.8 |
| Burglary | 35 | 377.2 |
| Motor Vehicle Theft | 15 | 161.6 |
| Arson | 0 | 0 |
| Violent Crime | 48 | 517.2 |
| Aggravated Assault | 42 | 452.6 |
| Murder | 3 | 32.3 |
| Robbery | 2 | 21.6 |
| Rape | 1 | 10.8 |
Lead series · rose across 5 comparable years · FBI UCR
Secondary series · rose · 2020-2024 · FBI UCR
| Year | Coverage | Population | Violent Rate | Property Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Comparable | 8,886 | 123.8 | 810.3 |
| 2021 | Comparable | 8,820 | 22.7 | 136.1 |
| 2022 | Comparable | 9,287 | 10.8 | 75.4 |
| 2023 | Comparable | 9,282 | 312.4 | 1551.4 |
| 2024 | Comparable | 9,280 | 517.2 | 1896.6 |
Sheffield Police Department filed the 2024 UCR row behind Sheffield's 224 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 Alabama cities closest to Sheffield in population. Their populations run from 8,838 to 9,638, against 9,280 here. Or use our side-by-side compare tool to benchmark two cities directly.
Sheffield sits at 517.2/100K violent (grade D); the Alabama cities below are the nearest matches after size peers are removed.
In 2024, Sheffield reported 48 violent crimes and 176 property crimes, for a total of 224 reported offenses.
From 2023 to 2024, Sheffield's violent crime rate increased by 65.6%, and the property crime rate increased by 22.3%.
The most common crime type in Sheffield is larceny-theft, accounting for 56.3% of all reported crimes (126 incidents in 2024).
Small-city read: Sheffield 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 Sheffield's small city row is sourced and ranked.
Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program CIUS Table 8 municipal crime rates · 2024 Sheffield, AL 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. Sheffield is scored as a small-city UCR reporter (9,280 on the row). See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.