Taos, NM has a F safety grade (0/100) with a violent crime rate of 937 per 100,000, 166% above the national average.
FBI UCR 2024 · per-capita rates · small city
Taos is a small municipal reporter (6,406 on the UCR row). Per-100,000 violent and property rates are shown with NM and U.S. context.
Data updated 2026-08-24
Taos, NM carries a PlainCrime F safety grade with violent crime 166% above the U.S. average
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program for 2024, Taos, NM shows violent crime at 936.6 per 100,000 residents and property crime at 5,978.8 per 100,000. Violent crime runs 166% 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.
2020–2024 direction
Across 5 comparable reporting years, the rate moved from 523.9 per 100,000 in 2020 to 936.6 in 2024 (+78.8%). The highest observed value was 1027.7 in 2023 and the lowest 523.9 in 2020. Years whose submission failed the completeness test are left out of this comparison rather than plotted as change.
Position in the state cohort
At 936.6 reported violent offenses per 100,000 residents in 2024, Taos ranks 5 of 43 — above 38 of the 42 other New Mexico cities whose 2024 submission passes this site’s completeness test. That is +96.1% against the cohort median of 477.6. 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 Taos's 936.6 violent-crime rate per 100,000 are Farmington (951.2), Roswell (848.4), Santa Fe (842.1), Lordsburg (831.8). 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 13.5% of the 443 Part I offenses reported in Taos for 2024, against a median of 21.6% across comparable New Mexico cities — a gap of 8.0 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 Taos'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 6.1 Census sq mi, Taos logged 63.3 property and 9.9 violent offenses per square mile in 2024.
Taos's 2024 book concentrates in larceny-theft (62% of 443 offenses; mix index 4,298).
Violent offenses are only 14% of the municipal total - a property-led book.
Taos offense mix (2024)
Density uses Census Gazetteer land area (6.1 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 | 383 | 5978.8 |
| Larceny-Theft | 273 | 4261.6 |
| Burglary | 71 | 1108.3 |
| Motor Vehicle Theft | 39 | 608.8 |
| Arson | 3 | 46.8 |
| Violent Crime | 60 | 936.6 |
| Aggravated Assault | 57 | 889.8 |
| Robbery | 2 | 31.2 |
| Rape | 1 | 15.6 |
| Murder | 0 | 0 |
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 | 5,917 | 523.9 | 4951.8 |
| 2021 | Comparable | 5,856 | 870.9 | 6045.1 |
| 2022 | Comparable | 6,613 | 741 | 6441.9 |
| 2023 | Comparable | 6,422 | 1027.7 | 5481.2 |
| 2024 | Comparable | 6,406 | 936.6 | 5978.8 |
Taos Police Department filed the 2024 UCR row behind Taos's 443 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 New Mexico cities closest to Taos in population. Their populations run from 4,094 to 8,653, against 6,406 here. Or use our side-by-side compare tool to benchmark two cities directly.
Taos sits at 936.6/100K violent (grade F); the New Mexico cities below are the nearest matches after size peers are removed.
In 2024, Taos reported 60 violent crimes and 383 property crimes, for a total of 443 reported offenses.
From 2023 to 2024, Taos's violent crime rate decreased by 8.9%, and the property crime rate increased by 9.1%.
The most common crime type in Taos is larceny-theft, accounting for 61.6% of all reported crimes (273 incidents in 2024).
Small-city read: Taos 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 Taos's small city row is sourced and ranked.
Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program CIUS Table 8 municipal crime rates · 2024 Taos, NM 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. Taos is scored as a small-city UCR reporter (6,406 on the row). See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.