U.S. Crime Statistics: Key Findings from 8,986 Cities (2024)
6 data-true findings for 2024, computed live from 8,986 cities per the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program: national scale, crime-type ratios, the highest raw-count city, the safest large city, and county-level coverage.
8,986 U.S. cities across all 50 states and the District of Columbia report crime data to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, drawn from 19,585 individual law enforcement agencies.
PlainCrime aggregates FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) 2024 data from 8,986 U.S. cities and 19,585 reporting agencies. Nationally, property crime outnumbered violent crime by roughly 4.9 to 1. Raw incident counts reflect city size as well as crime level; per-capita rates on city and state pages serve safety comparisons.
Key Findings
8,986 U.S. cities across all 50 states and the District of Columbia report crime data to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, drawn from 19,585 individual law enforcement agencies.
Nationally in 2024, property crime outnumbered violent crime by roughly 4.9 to 1, 5,819,331 property offenses against 1,197,336 violent offenses, across every reporting city.
New York, NY reported the highest raw violent-crime count of any U.S. city in 2024: 55,690 incidents. This reflects its size, the nation's largest city by population, not necessarily its relative safety; per-capita rates tell a different story.
Among cities with 250,000 or more residents, Irvine, CA had the lowest violent-crime rate nationally in 2024: 84 per 100,000 residents.
Only 2,422 of the nation's 3,143 Census counties and county-equivalents (about 77.1%) have FBI UCR Table 10 county rows in this vintage. The gap is voluntary agency participation in Table 10, not an omission by PlainCrime. The gap is not spread evenly: 5 jurisdictions (Alaska, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Massachusetts and Rhode Island) report no county-level data at all, so PlainCrime has no county pages for them.
PlainCrime's dataset spans 51 state-level jurisdictions (50 states plus the District of Columbia), each with its own violent and property crime totals benchmarked against the national average.
How These Findings Are Computed
Every figure above is queried live from PlainCrime's database at request time, the same data that powers every city, county, and state page on this site. Nothing here is estimated, rounded from a stale snapshot, or copy-pasted from a prior report; if the underlying FBI UCR data changes on the next annual release, these findings update automatically. Raw-count findings (like the highest violent-crime total) reflect a city's size as well as its crime level and should not be read as a safety ranking on their own, per-capita rates elsewhere on the site serve that purpose.
PlainCrime's catalog includes 19,585 law enforcement agencies from the FBI UCR 2024 vintage, covering violent and property offenses reported by police departments and sheriff's offices nationwide. That agency count is the row count in this database, not a separate FBI headline figure.
Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. See the methodology page for the full computation pipeline, or the data limitations guide for what these numbers can't tell you.
PlainCrime. (2024). U.S. Crime Statistics: Key Findings from 8,986 Cities (2024). Retrieved from https://plaincrime.com/statistics
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Every figure on PlainCrime is rendered directly from FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) source data, no number is typed in by an editor. Every figure on this page is queried live from FBI Uniform Crime Reporting source data at request time, no number is typed in by an editor or cached from a prior report. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.