Cities With the Highest Crime Rates (2023)

A high crime rate is a measurable statistic; "most dangerous" is a feeling. Crime rates measure reported offenses per 100,000 residents — they describe the level of activity in a place but not whether any individual will experience harm. Whether a city is "dangerous" for a specific person depends on neighborhood, time of day, behavior, and many other factors that aggregate citywide statistics cannot capture. We rank by rate; we do not rank by danger.

1 of the top 50 cities here are on improving 5-year trends, with crime rates falling at least 3% over the past five years. 16 are roughly stable (within ±3%), and 33 are still trending higher. That distribution matters: a city with elevated crime that is actively declining is on a different trajectory than one with the same rate that is rising. Always read level and trend together. The top 50 here average a violent crime rate of 665.5 per 100,000 — about 83% above the national average.

Yes — for fair city-to-city comparison. Raw counts unfairly penalize larger cities; a city with twice the population will have roughly twice the crime even at identical rates. Per-capita rates per 100,000 residents normalize for population so comparisons are apples-to-apples. The Bureau of Justice Statistics publishes population-adjusted rates as the standard methodology in its annual reports. Within a city, neighborhood-level rates can vary by an order of magnitude — citywide rates are useful for comparison, less useful for navigating any specific block.

Two reasons. First, many large U.S. metros have crime rates well below this group, despite their size — large absolute counts make headlines, but per-capita rates can still be moderate. Second, FBI UCR data depends on local police agencies reporting to the federal program. A small number of large cities had reporting gaps in recent years; we exclude cities without complete reporting from rate-based comparisons to avoid spurious rankings.

All rates come from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, accessed via the FBI Crime Data Explorer (CDE). Annual reported counts for each Part I offense are divided by U.S. Census population estimates to compute per-capita rates per 100,000. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) publishes complementary methodological notes and victimization data. All sources are U.S. government public domain.