Most dangerous cities in Pennsylvania

What this data cannot show

• This is 2024, while the state and national figures on this site are 2025. The FBI publishes its per-agency series a year behind its state series: the agency endpoint returns nothing for 2025, for any agency. A 2024 rate is not comparable with a 2025 one and no page here sets them side by side.
• This ranks city police departments serving 25,000 people or more, and contains no other kind of agency. A sheriff’s office is a different kind of reporting unit covering a different kind of population, and one ranking of both would be a ranking of neither.
• A ranking of places without a population floor is a ranking of small towns that had one incident, so the floor is stated here and a reader knows what is not on the list.
• 1,783 of the 1,828 city police departments large enough for a page reported violent crime in 2024. The rest submitted nothing and are absent rather than shown as zero.
• The bottom of this ranking is not a list of the safest places, and nothing here calls it one. Failing to report and having little crime move an agency the same way, so the bottom is where a thin record lands: the lowest reported rate in the country belongs to an agency that submitted nine months and one offense, against 769 in its highest year. The top cannot be reached that way, which is why only one end of this ranking carries a superlative.
• The two columns beside each rate are what separate a quiet jurisdiction from a thin record: how many months that agency submitted, and how this year compares with the most it has ever reported. No agency is removed from the ranking for a low share — a cut-off chosen because it looked about right would be a threshold wearing the clothes of a measurement — so the share is shown on every row instead.
• A rate is over the population that agency serves, in that year. Two agencies can serve overlapping populations — a city force and the sheriff around it — so these are never added to a county, state or national total.
• Violent crime is the FBI's own aggregation — murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault — and never a sum of component offenses we computed. Which offenses roll up into which is the publisher’s definition, and it has changed.
• Offenses are those reported to and recorded by that agency. They are not convictions, and they do not include what was never reported to police.
• The FBI cautions against ranking jurisdictions against one another. This shows the population behind every rate and how much of its own history each agency reported, which is the most a reader can be given without the ranking claiming more.
• Pennsylvania has 1,439 agencies in the FBI's records and 121 serve 25,000 or more. The rest are below the floor and are not ranked here, which is most of the state by agency count and a small part of it by population.