How We Calculate the Crime Index
The Crime Index is a single 0–100 score built from a state, city, or neighborhood's reported offense counts, normalized to a rate per 100,000 residents and weighted by offense severity. It answers one question: relative to the rest of the country, how much reported violent and property crime does this area carry?
Scale: 0–100, where higher means safer. Each area also gets a letter grade, A through F. Data year 2025 (methodology version us-1.0).
1. Grade bands, A–F
Grades are calibrated against the national distribution of every area we track for the same data year — they describe an area's relative standing, not an absolute promise. A "Very safe" grade means an area sits among the lowest-crime places in the country with usable data, not that nothing ever happens there.
| Grade | Meaning | Index range |
|---|---|---|
| A | Very safe | 88–100 |
| B | Safe | 75–87 |
| C | Moderate risk | 60–74 |
| D | Elevated risk | 45–59 |
| E | High risk | 30–44 |
| F | Critical risk | 0–29 |
2. Weighting: violent vs. property crime
The violent component carries 65% of the index and the property component 35%. Violent crime is weighted more heavily because it is the better proxy for physical risk to residents and, offense-for-offense, the harder category to hide from official statistics. Property crime still matters and still moves the score, but it carries less weight in part because reporting rates for property offenses vary more by insurance requirements, local policing priorities, and whether a victim expects any recovery from filing a report.
Violent offenses (homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault) and property offenses (burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, arson) are each converted to a rate per 100,000 residents, then combined using severity weights so that, for example, a homicide moves the score far more than a larceny. Raw counts are never compared directly across areas of different population sizes.
Violent (65%)
Homicide, Rape, Robbery, Aggravated assault
Property (35%)
Burglary, Larceny-theft, Motor vehicle theft, Arson
Homicide anchors the violent component with the highest severity weight in the index. Of every offense the FBI tracks, homicide is the least underreported and the most comparable across agencies and years — a body is difficult to hide, hard to reclassify, and rarely goes uninvestigated, unlike lower-severity offenses that depend heavily on whether a victim chooses to call the police. Anchoring the index on homicide keeps area-to-area comparisons honest even where other offense categories are inconsistently reported.
3. Sources
- FBI Crime Data Explorer: Official UCR/NIBRS offense counts and the reporting agency's covered population, by agency (ORI), state, and nationally.
- U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey (5-year estimates): Population figures used to convert raw offense counts into rates per 100,000 residents.
- Municipal open-data portals: City-published incident-level data (Socrata, ArcGIS, and similar platforms) used to compute neighborhood-level counts for the cities where that data is available.
FBI and Census figures are U.S. government works and are in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. §105 — freely reusable and, unlike proprietary scoring models, independently verifiable against the same source data anyone else can download.
4. Reported crime isn't all crime
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.
5. The "limited data coverage" flag
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.
6. Why this isn't a simplistic ranking
The FBI itself formally cautions against using its data to rank cities or otherwise draw simplistic comparisons between locales, warning that such rankings can create misleading impressions because agencies differ in how they define, record, and report offenses. We take that caution seriously and build several mitigations directly into this index rather than treating it as a disclaimer to bury in fine print.
- Every figure is normalized to a rate per 100,000 residents — never a raw offense count — so areas of different sizes are never compared unfairly.
- Homicide, the hardest offense to hide or misreport, anchors the violent component and therefore the overall score.
- The full methodology, offense list, weights, and data year are published and linked from every page that shows a score.
- Every score is shown with its underlying source and data year inline, not just a bare number.
- A "no area is risk-zero" disclaimer accompanies every grade so a favorable score is never read as a guarantee.
- Areas with thin agency reporting are flagged as data-limited and de-emphasized in rankings instead of being ranked as if their data were complete.
7. Data year
Scores reflect the most recent complete reporting year available from the FBI at the time of publication. FBI crime data is released on a lag, so the exact year in use is shown on each page rather than assumed — check the data year noted alongside any score before comparing it to figures from another source.
Current data year: 2025 · Source: FBI Crime Data Explorer (Summarized UCR/NIBRS) + U.S. Census ACS 5-year · License: Public domain (FBI CDE / U.S. Census, 17 U.S.C. §105) · Generated 2026-07-08T00:40:46.085Z.