Crime Rate in Illinois (2025)

No area has zero risk

A high Crime Index score means lower reported crime relative to other US cities — it is not a guarantee of safety. Reported crime is not the same as actual crime. Research on the gap between crime that occurs and crime that gets reported to police — often called the "dark figure" of crime — estimates that roughly 40% of violent crime and about a third of property crime go unreported each year. Every index built on official statistics, including this one, necessarily undercounts real crime. That gap is exactly why homicide — the offense with the smallest dark figure — anchors the calculation instead of a more commonly reported but less reliable category like theft.

Scores on this page reflect FBI-reported data for 2025. See the full methodology →

Limited data coverage: The FBI's 2021 transition to NIBRS-only reporting caused a sharp, temporary drop in nationwide participation, and some large states still lag in agency coverage for the most recent data years. When less than 60% of an area's population is covered by agencies that reported to the FBI for the data year, we flag that area as having limited data coverage, show the note on the page, and de-emphasize it in ranking landers rather than presenting an incomplete picture as if it were a complete one.