County crime profile · 2024 · mid-size county · property-led
Meade County (29,852 people) sits in the mid-size county band in South Dakota. This page opens with reported offense counts, then rates where a Census join exists.
Data updated 2026-08-24
Meade County, SD reported 60 violent crimes per 100,000 in FBI UCR 2024
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program for 2024, Meade County, SD agencies reported 18 violent and 152 property offenses. That equals about 60 violent and 509 property crimes per 100,000 using a verified Census population join. Table 10 coverage is a voluntary subset of U.S. counties.
Small-count caution
Meade County reported 18 violent offences in 2024 against a population of 29,852. At this volume one additional or one fewer report moves the per-100,000 rate noticeably, so the figure is better read as a data point than as a precise measurement, and year-to-year swings here are expected.
Offense mix
Violent offenses are 10.6% of the 170 Part I offenses reported in Meade County for 2024, against a median of 27.5% across comparable South Dakota counties — a gap of 16.9 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.
2020–2024 direction
Across 5 comparable reporting years, the rate moved from 103.8 per 100,000 in 2020 to 60.3 in 2024 (-41.9%). The highest observed value was 103.8 in 2020 and the lowest 56.9 in 2022. Years whose submission failed the completeness test are left out of this comparison rather than plotted as change.
Property-offense composition
Larceny-theft is 38.2% of reported property offenses in Meade County, against a cohort median of 60.0%. The remainder is burglary (87) and motor vehicle theft (7). Composition differences of this size usually track what kinds of places and property are present in a jurisdiction.
Position in the state cohort
At 60.3 reported violent offenses per 100,000 residents in 2024, Meade County ranks 16 of 41 — above 25 of the 40 other South Dakota counties whose 2024 submission passes this site’s completeness test and carries a matched Census denominator. That is +40.7% against the cohort median of 42.9. Counties that did not report, or that reported implausibly low totals, are excluded from this cohort rather than counted as low-crime.
Mid-size county rows still aggregate voluntary UCR submissions. Per-100,000 rates need a matched 2020 Census population; unmatched stay count-only. County-wide totals rarely describe any single town inside the line.
| Category | Count |
|---|---|
| Property Crime | 152 |
| Burglary | 87 |
| Larceny-Theft | 58 |
| Motor Vehicle Theft | 7 |
| Arson | 0 |
| Violent Crime | 18 |
| Murder | 0 |
| Rape | 1 |
| Robbery | 0 |
| Aggravated Assault | 17 |
Meade County's crime figures on this page originate from Meade County Sheriff's Office's submission to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program.
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.
A per-capita rate is easiest to read against places of similar scale, so these are the South Dakota counties closest to Meade County in population. Their populations run from 23,310 to 38,301, against 29,852 here. Or launch the side-by-side compare tool to benchmark two jurisdictions directly.
State atlas: South Dakota · Compare · Rankings
Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, Crime in the United States (CIUS) Table 10.
FBI Table 10 supplies county offense counts but no resident population. Where this page shows a per-100,000 rate, the denominator is a separately matched 2020 U.S. Census Bureau county population; unmatched county rows remain count-only. Statewide comparisons draw on the state UCR program. Verify with FBI.gov UCR and Census.gov QuickFacts.
Read our methodology , how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.
Every figure on PlainCrime is rendered directly from FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) source data, no number is typed in by an editor. This page draws directly on FBI Uniform Crime Reporting source data, no figure is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.