Polk County, IA

How safe is Polk County, IA? FBI UCR data snapshot

Polk County, IA reported 63 violent crimes and 593 property crimes in 2024, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. Total offenses across both Part I crime categories reached 656 for the reporting year, drawing on agency-level submissions from county law enforcement jurisdictions. Within the violent crime total, aggravated assault accounted for 49 incidents, robbery 6, murder 4, and rape 4, the four Part I violent offense categories tracked by the FBI.

Property crime in Polk County breaks down across burglary (54 incidents), larceny-theft (479), motor vehicle theft (60), and arson (2) for 2024. Larceny-theft represents roughly 81% of combined burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft reports, a pattern consistent with national property-crime distributions. County-level UCR figures reflect offenses reported by agencies operating within Polk County's geographic boundaries and do not include population-denominated per-capita rates, since FBI Table 10 aggregates county totals without resident counts.

Readers comparing Polk County with other Iowa jurisdictions should review the state-level crime page, which presents city and county figures side-by-side along with statewide rates benchmarked per 100,000 residents. Property offenses dominate the county crime mix here, consistent with national patterns where property crime runs several times higher than violent crime. All figures above are drawn directly from FBI UCR 2024 submissions; reporting completeness varies by agency and may change in later FBI revisions.

County figures aggregate the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) submissions of every law enforcement agency operating within the county, municipal police departments, the sheriff's office, and any campus or transit forces that report separately. Because participation in UCR is voluntary, coverage varies from one county to the next: a county where nearly every agency reports looks more complete than one where several do not, even when actual crime levels are similar. Rates are normalized per 100,000 residents so that densely and sparsely populated counties can be compared on the same footing. Keep one thing in mind, a county total blends very different communities. A quiet suburb and a struggling small city can fall inside the same county line, so a county-wide rate rarely describes any single neighborhood within it.