Massachusetts'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
Massachusetts's violent crime rate fell 19.8% from 2014 to 2024; its property crime rate fell 39.7%. The endpoints agree on the broad direction, but the intervening years still matter.
Full-window endpoints
Violent crime moved from 385.2 to 308.8 per 100,000 (-19.8%). Property crime moved from 1824.7 to 1101.2 (-39.7%). 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 2.5%, compared with -19.8% across the full 2014-2024 window. That difference is why the latest few observations should be read separately from the decade-scale endpoints.
Peak and trough
The highest observed violent-crime rate was 385.2 in 2014; the lowest was 301.3 in 2021. The latest value lies 9% 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.
Latest national comparison
For 2024, the state rate was 308.8 per 100,000 versus 352.0 across the state records in this dataset, a gap of 12.3% below. This is a state-level benchmark, not a neighborhood-safety conclusion.
Year-to-year movement
The largest annual change ran from 2021 to 2022: +7.7%. Across the full sequence, 1 year-to-year steps rose by more than 1% and 8 fell by more than 1%. A single sharp step can reflect participation or reporting changes as well as a real change in recorded offenses.
Rate denominator
The reported population changed from 6,745,408 to 7,136,171 (+5.8%). 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.
Massachusetts's property rate fell 11.2% (-159.8 per 100K) from 2017 to 2018 (1420.8 → 1261.0) — the sharpest comparable year-to-year step in this window. The largest move the other way was jumped 7.6% from 2021 to 2022 (1005.9 → 1082.5).
Massachusetts's property gap vs the US aggregate moved from 27.6% below in 2014 to 35.6% below in 2024 (-8.0 pp).
| Year | Coverage | Population | Property | Rate | YoY | Violent | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Comparable | 7,136,171 | 78,587 | 1101.2 | ↓ 3.7% | 22,034 | 308.8 |
| 2023 | Comparable | 7,001,399 | 80,058 | 1143.5 | ↑ 5.6% | 22,789 | 325.5 |
| 2022 | Comparable | 6,981,974 | 75,583 | 1082.5 | ↑ 7.6% | 22,652 | 324.4 |
| 2021 | Comparable | 6,984,723 | 70,259 | 1005.9 | ↓ 5.3% | 21,042 | 301.3 |
| 2020 | Comparable | 6,893,574 | 73,243 | 1062.5 | ↓ 9.4% | 21,358 | 309.8 |
| 2019 | Comparable | 6,892,503 | 80,868 | 1173.3 | ↓ 7.0% | 22,524 | 326.8 |
| 2018 | Comparable | 6,902,149 | 87,035 | 1261 | ↓ 11.2% | 23,269 | 337.1 |
| 2017 | Comparable | 6,859,819 | 97,462 | 1420.8 | ↓ 7.3% | 24,230 | 353.2 |
| 2016 | Comparable | 6,811,779 | 104,362 | 1532.1 | ↓ 7.0% | 25,429 | 373.3 |
| 2015 | Comparable | 6,794,422 | 111,951 | 1647.7 | ↓ 9.7% | 25,836 | 380.3 |
| 2014 | Comparable | 6,745,408 | 123,084 | 1824.7 | - | 25,985 | 385.2 |
More in Massachusetts: overview, safest cities, most dangerous, compare. Methodology — FBI UCR / Crime Data Explorer rates per 100,000 for Massachusetts (2014–2024); Census population where FBI denominators are missing.