County crime profile · 2024 · mid-size county · property-led
Polk County (31,519 people) sits in the mid-size county band in Missouri. This page opens with reported offense counts, then rates where a Census join exists.
Data updated 2026-08-24
Polk County, MO reported 140 violent crimes per 100,000 in FBI UCR 2024
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program for 2024, Polk County, MO agencies reported 44 violent and 168 property offenses. That equals about 140 violent and 533 property crimes per 100,000 using a verified Census population join. Table 10 coverage is a voluntary subset of U.S. counties.
2021–2024 direction
Across 4 comparable reporting years, the rate moved from 314.1 per 100,000 in 2021 to 139.6 in 2024 (-55.6%). The highest observed value was 314.1 in 2021 and the lowest 139.6 in 2022. Years whose submission failed the completeness test are left out of this comparison rather than plotted as change.
Offense mix
Violent offenses are 20.8% of the 212 Part I offenses reported in Polk County for 2024, against a median of 26.5% across comparable Missouri counties — a gap of 5.8 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.
Position in the state cohort
At 139.6 reported violent offenses per 100,000 residents in 2024, Polk County ranks 33 of 77 — above 44 of the 76 other Missouri counties whose 2024 submission passes this site’s completeness test and carries a matched Census denominator. That is +13.3% against the cohort median of 123.3. 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 | 168 |
| Burglary | 41 |
| Larceny-Theft | 108 |
| Motor Vehicle Theft | 19 |
| Arson | 6 |
| Violent Crime | 44 |
| Murder | 1 |
| Rape | 11 |
| Robbery | 1 |
| Aggravated Assault | 31 |
Polk County's crime figures on this page originate from Polk 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 Missouri counties closest to Polk County in population. Their populations run from 28,283 to 34,534, against 31,519 here. Or launch the side-by-side compare tool to benchmark two jurisdictions directly.
State atlas: Missouri · 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.