Crime Topics

The ten most common crime-data questions PlainCrime answers, with direct links into the data and explainer guides. Every topic draws on FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) submissions.

Is [city] safe?
Safety
Each city detail page answers the safety question with a composite A+ to F grade, violent and property crime rates, comparisons to state and national averages, and year-over-year trend data.
Safest cities and states
Rankings
National and state-level rankings of the safest cities based on FBI UCR violent crime rates per 100,000 residents. Includes population-weighted filters and multi-year stability checks.
Most dangerous cities
Rankings
Cities with the highest violent crime rates per 100,000 residents. Part I offenses only, population threshold applied to filter out small-sample statistical noise.
Safety grades (A+ to F)
Grades
PlainCrime assigns each city a composite safety grade derived from violent and property crime rates benchmarked against national UCR averages. Browse grade distributions by state.
Crime trends over time
Trends
Multi-year national violent and property crime trends with year-over-year change analysis. Understand whether crime is rising or falling nationally and in your state.
How FBI UCR data works
Methodology
The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program collects voluntary submissions from local agencies. Our explainer covers what UCR captures, what it misses, and how rate calculations work.
Violent vs property crime
Definitions
The two Part I categories behave very differently. Property crime typically outnumbers violent crime by roughly 7:1 nationally. Category definitions and implications explained.
Crime, housing, and schools
Relocation
How local crime rates connect to rent prices, home values, and school enrollment patterns, a cross-portal data story drawing on FBI, HUD, Census, and NCES records.
When crime stats mislead
Caveats
Reporting gaps, the dark figure of unreported crime, and the methodology differences between UCR and NCVS. A critical look at data limitations.
Compare two jurisdictions
Tools
Side-by-side crime comparison between any two cities, counties, or states. See rates, grades, trends, and category breakdowns in a single view.

Methodology

Topic pages surface different cuts of the same underlying dataset: the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program Part I offense submissions published annually in Crime in the United States. City data comes from Table 8, county data from Table 10, and state totals roll up agency submissions per the FBI state-level tables.

All per-capita rates are normalized to per-100,000 residents using the formula (offenses ÷ reporting population) × 100,000. Composite safety grades benchmark city rates against current national averages, an "A+" indicates well below the national violent and property crime rates; an "F" indicates well above. We reference U.S. Census Bureau population estimates where FBI populations are missing.

UCR participation is voluntary and not every city reports every year. Rate volatility in small jurisdictions is a known limitation, see the crime data limitations guide for a full discussion.

Every figure on PlainCrime is rendered directly from FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) source data, no number is typed in by an editor. This page draws directly on FBI Uniform Crime Reporting source data, no figure is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.

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