New Jersey'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
New Jersey's violent crime rate fell 16.1% from 2014 to 2024; its property crime rate fell 19.7%. The endpoints agree on the broad direction, but the intervening years still matter.
Recent direction check
From 2021 to 2024, the violent-crime rate rose 54.7%, compared with -16.1% 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 257.0 in 2014; the lowest was 139.4 in 2021. The latest value lies 65% 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 215.7 per 100,000 versus 352.0 across the state records in this dataset, a gap of 38.7% 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: +47.7%. Across the full sequence, 2 year-to-year steps rose by more than 1% and 6 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 257.0 to 215.7 per 100,000 (-16.1%). Property crime moved from 1738.1 to 1395.7 (-19.7%). These are endpoint comparisons, not proof that every intervening year followed the same direction.
Rate denominator
The reported population changed from 8,938,175 to 9,500,851 (+6.3%). 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.
New Jersey's property rate rose 77.7% (+590.5 per 100K) from 2021 to 2022 (760.3 → 1350.8) — the sharpest comparable year-to-year step in this window. The largest move the other way was dropped 34.6% from 2020 to 2021 (1162.4 → 760.3).
New Jersey's property gap vs the US aggregate moved from 31.1% below in 2014 to 18.4% below in 2024 (+12.6 pp).
| Year | Coverage | Population | Property | Rate | YoY | Violent | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Comparable | 9,500,851 | 132,607 | 1395.7 | ↓ 5.5% | 20,492 | 215.7 |
| 2023 | Comparable | 9,290,841 | 137,237 | 1477.1 | ↑ 9.4% | 20,195 | 217.4 |
| 2022 | Comparable | 9,261,699 | 125,111 | 1350.8 | ↑ 77.7% | 19,074 | 205.9 |
| 2021 | Comparable | 9,267,130 | 70,458 | 760.3 | ↓ 34.6% | 12,919 | 139.4 |
| 2020 | Comparable | 8,882,371 | 103,249 | 1162.4 | ↓ 13.3% | 17,362 | 195.5 |
| 2019 | Comparable | 8,882,190 | 119,089 | 1340.8 | ↓ 4.9% | 18,415 | 207.3 |
| 2018 | Comparable | 8,908,520 | 125,564 | 1409.5 | ↓ 9.8% | 18,535 | 208.1 |
| 2017 | Comparable | 9,005,644 | 140,660 | 1561.9 | ↑ 0.8% | 20,604 | 228.8 |
| 2016 | Comparable | 8,944,469 | 138,576 | 1549.3 | ↓ 4.7% | 21,855 | 244.3 |
| 2015 | Comparable | 8,958,013 | 145,592 | 1625.3 | ↓ 6.5% | 22,592 | 252.2 |
| 2014 | Comparable | 8,938,175 | 155,352 | 1738.1 | - | 22,970 | 257 |
More in New Jersey: overview, safest cities, most dangerous, compare. Methodology — FBI UCR / Crime Data Explorer rates per 100,000 for New Jersey (2014–2024); Census population where FBI denominators are missing.