West Virginia'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
West Virginia's violent crime rate fell 6.8% from 2014 to 2024; its property crime rate fell 33.7%. The endpoints agree on the broad direction, but the intervening years still matter.
Full-window endpoints
Violent crime moved from 259.2 to 241.6 per 100,000 (-6.8%). Property crime moved from 1643.4 to 1089.3 (-33.7%). These are endpoint comparisons, not proof that every intervening year followed the same direction.
Latest national comparison
For 2024, the state rate was 241.6 per 100,000 versus 352.0 across the state records in this dataset, a gap of 31.4% below. This is a state-level benchmark, not a neighborhood-safety conclusion.
Peak and trough
The highest observed violent-crime rate was 329.8 in 2017; the lowest was 241.6 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.
Year-to-year movement
The largest annual change ran from 2017 to 2018: -20.0%. Across the full sequence, 4 year-to-year steps rose by more than 1% and 4 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 1,850,326 to 1,769,979 (-4.3%). 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.
West Virginia's property rate fell 21.4% (-352.3 per 100K) from 2017 to 2018 (1642.7 → 1290.4) — the sharpest comparable year-to-year step in this window. The largest move the other way was jumped 7.5% from 2015 to 2016 (1666.1 → 1790.8).
West Virginia's property gap vs the US aggregate moved from 34.8% below in 2014 to 36.3% below in 2024 (-1.5 pp).
| Year | Coverage | Population | Property | Rate | YoY | Violent | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Comparable | 1,769,979 | 19,280 | 1089.3 | ↓ 3.0% | 4,277 | 241.6 |
| 2023 | Comparable | 1,770,071 | 19,877 | 1122.9 | ↓ 5.3% | 4,525 | 255.6 |
| 2022 | Comparable | 1,775,156 | 21,059 | 1186.3 | ↓ 0.7% | 4,692 | 264.3 |
| 2021 | Comparable | 1,782,959 | 21,306 | 1195 | ↓ 6.2% | 4,690 | 263 |
| 2020 | Comparable | 1,784,787 | 22,745 | 1274.4 | ↑ 4.3% | 5,159 | 289.1 |
| 2019 | Comparable | 1,792,147 | 21,903 | 1222.2 | ↓ 5.3% | 4,708 | 262.7 |
| 2018 | Comparable | 1,805,832 | 23,303 | 1290.4 | ↓ 21.4% | 4,768 | 264 |
| 2017 | Comparable | 1,815,857 | 29,829 | 1642.7 | ↓ 8.3% | 5,989 | 329.8 |
| 2016 | Comparable | 1,831,102 | 32,791 | 1790.8 | ↑ 7.5% | 5,938 | 324.3 |
| 2015 | Comparable | 1,844,128 | 30,725 | 1666.1 | ↑ 1.4% | 5,298 | 287.3 |
| 2014 | Comparable | 1,850,326 | 30,409 | 1643.4 | - | 4,796 | 259.2 |
More in West Virginia: overview, safest cities, most dangerous, compare. Methodology — FBI UCR / Crime Data Explorer rates per 100,000 for West Virginia (2014–2024); Census population where FBI denominators are missing.