Most Dangerous Cities in Utah

FBI UCR Highest-Crime Snapshot: Utah

Utah's 50 highest-crime cities for 2024 range from Salt Lake City at the top with a violent crime rate of 864.2/100K down to Syracuse at 51.7/100K — all sitting above most US municipal averages. The list draws on FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program Table 8 submissions and restricts inclusion to cities of 10,000 residents or more so that per-capita rates reflect enough underlying offenses to be statistically meaningful. Across these 50 Utah cities the average violent crime rate reaches 187.3 per 100,000 residents, a figure that typically exceeds the US national violent crime benchmark by a wide margin.

At the top of the ranking, Salt Lake City recorded 1,838 violent crimes and 11,059 property crimes against a reporting population of 212,675 in 2024. That produces a property crime rate of 5200 per 100,000 residents alongside the 864.2/100K violent rate, with both Part I crime categories elevated compared to state and national benchmarks. The five most dangerous Utah cities on this list are Salt Lake City, South Salt Lake, Ogden, West Valley, Tooele, each submitting Part I offense counts to the FBI UCR Program for 2024.

Elevated per-capita rates can reflect multiple factors beyond raw crime volume: small reporting populations amplify year-to-year rate volatility, transient or tourist populations dilute resident denominators, and municipal boundaries sometimes exclude higher-income suburbs that would otherwise balance the total. UCR figures also reflect offenses reported to and submitted by local law enforcement and can miss unreported crime entirely, so rankings measure visible, recorded crime rather than absolute community conditions. Readers comparing these cities with others across Utah can use the A-F safety grades page or national rankings to contextualize how 2024 figures stack up against peers nationwide.