County crime profile · 2024 · mid-size county · property-led
Wetzel County (14,442 people) sits in the mid-size county band in West Virginia. This page opens with reported offense counts, then rates where a Census join exists.
Data updated 2026-08-24
Wetzel County, WV reported 97 violent crimes per 100,000 in FBI UCR 2024
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program for 2024, Wetzel County, WV agencies reported 14 violent and 33 property offenses. That equals about 97 violent and 229 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
Wetzel County reported 14 violent offences in 2024 against a population of 14,442. 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.
Property-offense composition
Larceny-theft is 39.4% of reported property offenses in Wetzel County, against a cohort median of 72.3%. The remainder is burglary (14) and motor vehicle theft (6). Composition differences of this size usually track what kinds of places and property are present in a jurisdiction.
Offense mix
Violent offenses are 29.8% of the 47 Part I offenses reported in Wetzel County for 2024, against a median of 18.7% across comparable West Virginia counties — a gap of 11.1 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 138.5 per 100,000 in 2020 to 96.9 in 2024 (-30.0%). The highest observed value was 311.6 in 2022 and the lowest 83.1 in 2021. Years whose submission failed the completeness test are left out of this comparison rather than plotted as change.
Position in the state cohort
At 96.9 reported violent offenses per 100,000 residents in 2024, Wetzel County ranks 12 of 32 — above 20 of the 31 other West Virginia counties whose 2024 submission passes this site’s completeness test and carries a matched Census denominator. That is +54.2% against the cohort median of 62.9. 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 | 33 |
| Burglary | 14 |
| Larceny-Theft | 13 |
| Motor Vehicle Theft | 6 |
| Arson | 0 |
| Violent Crime | 14 |
| Murder | 0 |
| Rape | 3 |
| Robbery | 0 |
| Aggravated Assault | 11 |
Wetzel County's crime figures on this page originate from Wetzel 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 Wetzel County in population. Their populations run from 11,959 to 17,063, against 14,442 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.