About the crime figures

Raw crime figures can be misleading, which is why the FBI recommends against using them to compare across cities. This page describes what the figures mean, what they don't mean, and why they are not used to rank cities on this site.

What the numbers are

Each city page can show two figures, both from the FBI's national crime-reporting program:

• Violent crime: murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault reported to police, per 100,000 people a year.
• Property crime: burglary, larceny-theft and motor vehicle theft reported to police, per 100,000 people a year.

The FBI counts crimes reported to police agencies that submitted a full year of data, from across the metro area's agencies. Unreported crimes are not included, and reporting behavior differs from place to place.

What "coverage" means

It is optional for police agencies to report to the FBI. Some agencies report every month, some report a few months, and some don't report at all. Coverage is the share of a metro's people living in areas whose agencies reported a full year.

These shares are based on the reported crimes only in the population those agencies cover, not the whole metro, so cities where many agencies don't report to the FBI will not have rates that appear artificially low. When coverage becomes too sparse, no figure is shown at all on this site.

Why cities aren't compared on crime

Crime figures collected by different cities may have different reporting habits and cover different shares of their people, making cross-city comparisons potentially misleading. This is why the FBI cautions against using their data to rank or compare cities. The crime figures on city pages are provided as context, but not used in the calculations of any of this site's scores.

Where it comes from

FBI Crime Data Explorer, agency-level submissions, aggregated to metro areas using the government's county definitions. The reference year is shown with the figures.