County crime profile · 2024 · small county · property-led
Ritchie County is a small county (8,444 people) in West Virginia. FBI Table 10 county totals lead; rates appear only with a verified Census population join.
Data updated 2026-08-24
Ritchie County, WV reported 47 violent crimes per 100,000 in FBI UCR 2024
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program for 2024, Ritchie County, WV agencies reported 4 violent and 30 property offenses. That equals about 47 violent and 355 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
Ritchie County reported 4 violent offences in 2024 against a population of 8,444. 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.
2021–2024 direction
Across 3 comparable reporting years, the rate moved from 71.1 per 100,000 in 2021 to 47.4 in 2024 (-33.3%). The highest observed value was 71.1 in 2021 and the lowest 23.7 in 2023. Years whose submission failed the completeness test are left out of this comparison rather than plotted as change.
Offense mix
Violent offenses are 11.8% of the 34 Part I offenses reported in Ritchie County for 2024, against a median of 19.6% across comparable West Virginia counties — a gap of 7.8 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 47.4 reported violent offenses per 100,000 residents in 2024, Ritchie County ranks 21 of 32 — above 11 of the 31 other West Virginia counties whose 2024 submission passes this site’s completeness test and carries a matched Census denominator. That is -26.5% against the cohort median of 64.4. Counties that did not report, or that reported implausibly low totals, are excluded from this cohort rather than counted as low-crime.
Property-offense composition
Larceny-theft is 63.3% of reported property offenses in Ritchie County, against a cohort median of 72.3%. The remainder is burglary (11) and motor vehicle theft (0). Composition differences of this size usually track what kinds of places and property are present in a jurisdiction.
Small-county UCR rows are especially sensitive to which agencies filed. Per-100,000 rates use a matched 2020 Census population when available; otherwise counts only. Do not treat the county total as a town-level crime level.
| Category | Count |
|---|---|
| Property Crime | 30 |
| Burglary | 11 |
| Larceny-Theft | 19 |
| Motor Vehicle Theft | 0 |
| Arson | 0 |
| Violent Crime | 4 |
| Murder | 3 |
| Rape | 0 |
| Robbery | 0 |
| Aggravated Assault | 1 |
Ritchie County's crime figures on this page originate from Ritchie 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 West Virginia counties closest to Ritchie County in population. Their populations run from 7,408 to 14,028, against 8,444 here. Or launch the side-by-side compare tool to benchmark two jurisdictions directly.
State atlas: West Virginia · 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.