How we count crime rates
Every number on CrimeRateFacts comes from the FBI's Crime Data Explorer (CDE), the public home of the Uniform Crime Reporting program. We store each file we use, with the date we fetched it, and build the pages only from those stored files. No number is estimated, interpolated or written by a person or an AI.
City pages are police agencies
A city page shows the city's own municipal police department, identified by its FBI agency code (ORI). Sheriffs, university, transit and port police report separately, and their crimes are not in the city's numbers; when a city has such agencies, its page says so. The population is the one the FBI attaches to the agency for that year.
Rates per 100,000 residents
A city's rate is the number of offenses its police reported for the year, divided by the residents the agency covers, times 100,000, rounded to one decimal. We compute it only for a year with all 12 months reported. The state and US rates are the FBI's own estimates, which fill in for agencies that did not report; they are labelled "FBI estimate" wherever they appear. The FBI does not estimate arson for states or the nation, so arson has no state or US rate.
Partial years and gaps
Since 2021 the FBI collects crime data through its newer system, NIBRS. Many agencies sent no data, or only some months, while they switched. A year with fewer than 12 months is shown as "Partial year: N of 12 months", a year with no data as "Not reported". Neither gets a rate, neither is drawn as zero in a chart, and neither is used in a sentence about a trend. A year sent with 3 or more zero months in a city of 20,000 or more residents is marked "Not usable": that pattern is what catch-up reporting looks like, not a year without crime.
Why there are no rankings
The FBI's guidance "UCR Statistics: Their Proper Use" warns against ranking cities or agencies by these figures: places differ in population density, visitors and commuters, economic conditions, how residents report crime and how their police record it. We follow it. City and state tables are alphabetical, nothing is sorted by rate, and we don't rate any place as safe or unsafe.
What the numbers can't show
- Differences between neighborhoods: the FBI publishes agency totals, not neighborhood data.
- Crimes nobody reported to the police.
- Who the victims or offenders were: we show no demographics.
Checks before a page is published
A city page is open to search engines only when its newest year has all 12 months, at least 8 offense facts for that year and at least 3 of the 5 years fully reported. Its written explanation is checked by code: every number must match a stored value, every comparison (higher, lower, rose, fell, most) must agree with the stored numbers, and words that judge a place are refused. When the FBI's count looks far from a city's own published data, we compare them and hold the page until the difference is explained.
FBI data refresh used here: October 15, 2026. Files and fetch dates: Sources.