Alabama's comparable FBI window (2014–2024, 11 years) shows declines on both major offense rates — charts below keep the larger |endpoint| move first.
Declining-window verdict
Alabama's violent crime rate fell 7.0% from 2014 to 2024; its property crime rate fell 46.4%. The endpoints agree on the broad direction, but the intervening years still matter.
Peak and trough
The highest observed violent-crime rate was 516.8 in 2016; the lowest was 196.3 in 2019. The latest value lies 56% of the way from that low to that peak, which shows whether the endpoint is close to an extreme or near the middle of the observed range.
Year-to-year movement
The largest annual change ran from 2018 to 2019: -59.9%. Across the full sequence, 6 year-to-year steps rose by more than 1% and 3 fell by more than 1%. A single sharp step can reflect participation or reporting changes as well as a real change in recorded offenses.
Full-window endpoints
Violent crime moved from 404.2 to 376.1 per 100,000 (-7.0%). Property crime moved from 3023.8 to 1622.1 (-46.4%). These are endpoint comparisons, not proof that every intervening year followed the same direction.
Recent direction check
From 2021 to 2024, the violent-crime rate rose 24.6%, compared with -7.0% across the full 2014-2024 window. That difference is why the latest few observations should be read separately from the decade-scale endpoints.
Latest national comparison
For 2024, the state rate was 376.1 per 100,000 versus 352.0 across the state records in this dataset, a gap of 6.8% above. This is a state-level benchmark, not a neighborhood-safety conclusion.
Rate denominator
The reported population changed from 4,849,377 to 5,157,699 (+6.4%). Rates account for that denominator change; raw offense counts do not. This is one reason a count and a per-100,000 rate can move by different percentages over the same years.
Alabama's property rate fell 60.1% (-1606.1 per 100K) from 2018 to 2019 (2672.0 → 1065.9) — the sharpest comparable year-to-year step in this window. The largest move the other way was jumped 31.8% from 2021 to 2022 (1265.9 → 1667.9).
Alabama's property gap vs the US aggregate moved from 19.9% above in 2014 to 5.2% below in 2024 (-25.1 pp).
| Year | Coverage | Population | Property | Rate | YoY | Violent | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Comparable | 5,157,699 | 83,663 | 1622.1 | ↓ 4.9% | 19,397 | 376.1 |
| 2023 | Comparable | 5,108,468 | 87,114 | 1705.3 | ↑ 2.2% | 19,974 | 391 |
| 2022 | Comparable | 5,074,296 | 84,636 | 1667.9 | ↑ 31.8% | 19,511 | 384.5 |
| 2021 | Comparable | 5,039,877 | 63,800 | 1265.9 | ↑ 25.0% | 15,213 | 301.9 |
| 2020 | Comparable | 4,921,532 | 49,841 | 1012.7 | ↓ 5.0% | 10,624 | 215.9 |
| 2019 | Comparable | 4,903,185 | 52,261 | 1065.9 | ↓ 60.1% | 9,625 | 196.3 |
| 2018 | Comparable | 4,887,871 | 130,604 | 2672 | ↓ 5.1% | 23,937 | 489.7 |
| 2017 | Comparable | 4,874,747 | 137,191 | 2814.3 | ↓ 2.7% | 23,974 | 491.8 |
| 2016 | Comparable | 4,863,300 | 140,657 | 2892.2 | ↑ 0.2% | 25,134 | 516.8 |
| 2015 | Comparable | 4,858,979 | 140,304 | 2887.5 | ↓ 4.5% | 22,117 | 455.2 |
| 2014 | Comparable | 4,849,377 | 146,634 | 3023.8 | - | 19,603 | 404.2 |
More in Alabama: overview, safest cities, most dangerous, compare. Methodology — FBI UCR / Crime Data Explorer rates per 100,000 for Alabama (2014–2024); Census population where FBI denominators are missing.