South Carolina'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
South Carolina's violent crime rate fell 10.6% from 2014 to 2024; its property crime rate fell 42.3%. The endpoints agree on the broad direction, but the intervening years still matter.
Full-window endpoints
Violent crime moved from 491.3 to 439.3 per 100,000 (-10.6%). Property crime moved from 3446.0 to 1988.2 (-42.3%). These are endpoint comparisons, not proof that every intervening year followed the same direction.
Latest national comparison
For 2024, the state rate was 439.3 per 100,000 versus 352.0 across the state records in this dataset, a gap of 24.8% above. This is a state-level benchmark, not a neighborhood-safety conclusion.
Peak and trough
The highest observed violent-crime rate was 524.5 in 2020; the lowest was 439.3 in 2024. The latest value lies 0% 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.
Rate denominator
The reported population changed from 4,832,482 to 5,478,831 (+13.4%). 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.
Year-to-year movement
The largest annual change ran from 2023 to 2024: -7.9%. Across the full sequence, 3 year-to-year steps rose by more than 1% and 5 fell by more than 1%. A single sharp step can reflect participation or reporting changes as well as a real change in recorded offenses.
South Carolina's property rate fell 11.3% (-254.0 per 100K) from 2023 to 2024 (2242.2 → 1988.2) — the sharpest comparable year-to-year step in this window.
South Carolina's property gap vs the US aggregate moved from 36.7% above in 2014 to 16.2% above in 2024 (-20.5 pp).
| Year | Coverage | Population | Property | Rate | YoY | Violent | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Comparable | 5,478,831 | 108,928 | 1988.2 | ↓ 11.3% | 24,069 | 439.3 |
| 2023 | Comparable | 5,373,555 | 120,486 | 2242.2 | ↓ 4.6% | 25,624 | 476.9 |
| 2022 | Comparable | 5,282,634 | 124,144 | 2350 | ↓ 6.4% | 26,333 | 498.5 |
| 2021 | Comparable | 5,190,705 | 130,274 | 2509.8 | ↓ 7.1% | 26,636 | 513.1 |
| 2020 | Comparable | 5,218,040 | 140,993 | 2702 | ↓ 6.5% | 27,371 | 524.5 |
| 2019 | Comparable | 5,148,714 | 148,813 | 2890.3 | ↓ 4.7% | 25,850 | 502.1 |
| 2018 | Comparable | 5,084,127 | 154,219 | 3033.3 | ↓ 4.2% | 25,087 | 493.4 |
| 2017 | Comparable | 5,024,369 | 159,010 | 3164.8 | ↓ 2.6% | 25,150 | 500.6 |
| 2016 | Comparable | 4,961,119 | 161,187 | 3249 | ↓ 1.2% | 24,974 | 503.4 |
| 2015 | Comparable | 4,896,146 | 161,063 | 3289.6 | ↓ 4.5% | 24,025 | 490.7 |
| 2014 | Comparable | 4,832,482 | 166,526 | 3446 | - | 23,740 | 491.3 |
More in South Carolina: overview, safest cities, most dangerous, compare. Methodology — FBI UCR / Crime Data Explorer rates per 100,000 for South Carolina (2014–2024); Census population where FBI denominators are missing.