Counties by reported violent crime rate

What the FBI says about ranking jurisdictions

These rankings, however, are merely a quick choice made by the data user; they provide no insight into the many variables that mold the crime in a particular town, city, county, state, region, or other jurisdiction. Consequently, these rankings lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with their residents.

The data user is, therefore, cautioned against comparing statistical data of individual reporting units from cities, counties, metropolitan areas, states, or colleges or universities solely on the basis of their population coverage or student enrollment.

We publish the rate, the count, the population it divides by and how much of its own record each agency reported, together on the same row, and we say that a figure describes what was reported to police rather than what happened. Nothing here is ranked on a measure the FBI did not publish for it.

How to read this

• The bottom of this table is not a list of the safest places. Failing to report and having little crime move an agency the same way. The lowest reported violent rate among county sheriff’s offices for 2024 belongs to Volusia County, FL, on 1 offenses over 130,653 residents — 9 months submitted, and 0.1% of what the same agency reported in its best year. The top of the table cannot be reached that way, which is why only one end of this ranking carries a superlative.
• The last two columns are what separate a quiet jurisdiction from a thin record: how many months an agency submitted, and how this year compares with the most it has ever reported. No agency is removed 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.
• An agency is not a place. A city with its own force and a transit police force is not the sum of them, and a sheriff’s office serves the part of a county nobody else polices. Each row is what one agency reported for the population it serves.
• Rates, not counts. Ranking by the number of offenses would rank agencies by how many people they serve. The floor of 25,000 is stated because a ranking of places without one is a ranking of small towns that had a single incident.
• Violent crime is the FBI’s own category: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. It is never a sum of component offenses we computed — which offenses roll up into which is the publisher’s definition, and it has changed. These are offenses reported to and recorded by that agency — not convictions, and not what was never reported to police.

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 county sheriff’s offices serving 25,000 people or more, and contains no other kind of agency. A city police department 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.
• 899 of the 941 county sheriff’s offices 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 best 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.