How to Check the Crime Rate in an Area Before You Move

A national crime number tells you almost nothing about the street you are about to live on. The FBI's 2025 figures, published this summer in the Crime Data Explorer, show violent crime down 9.3% from 2024 and murder down 18.1%, which the bureau and outside analysts describe as the largest one-year drop in violent crime on record. That is good news for the country. It is not a fact about your town.

A record national drop is an average of thousands of places moving in different directions. Some big cities fell a lot, some small towns rose, and most quiet places stayed quiet. If you are choosing where to move, you need the number for one place, read the right way. Here are five steps that use only free, official data.

Step 1: Look Up the Police Agency, Not the City Name

The FBI does not publish crime by neighborhood, by ZIP code or by county. It publishes what each law enforcement agency reports: a city police department, a county sheriff, a campus police force. So the first job is to find out which agency actually covers the address you are looking at.

This matters most at the edge of town. A house with a city mailing address can sit outside the city limits, where the county sheriff patrols. The sheriff's numbers usually cover only the unincorporated parts of the county, not the cities inside it. Two homes five minutes apart can belong to two different rows of FBI data.

Once you know the agency, search for it in the Crime Data Explorer and pull up its page. You will see counts of each type of crime by year.

Step 2: Be Suspicious of a Year That Looks Too Good

A sudden one-year plunge on an agency's chart is more often a paperwork gap than a safer town. Agencies send their data to the FBI voluntarily, and the agency chart will not warn you when a department sent in only part of a year. The tell is a year that sits far below the years on either side of it.

The clearest example is 2021. That year the FBI switched every agency to a new reporting system, and thousands of departments did not make the change in time, including the New York and Los Angeles police departments. Roughly a third of the U.S. population was missing from that year's data. Reporting has recovered since: for 2025 the FBI says more than 17,000 agencies covering about 96% of the population took part. But if the agency you are checking shows a strange dip around 2021 or 2022, read it as missing data.

Step 3: Read Five Years, Not One

In a small place, one bad night can double the crime rate, and one quiet year can cut it in half. A town of 8,000 people that goes from one robbery to three has "tripled" its robbery rate, and nothing about the town has changed. The smaller the population, the less a single year means.

So ignore the one-year change and look at the level across five years or more. Ask two plain questions. Is this place usually low, middling or high compared with places its size? And is the line drifting in one direction over several years, or just bouncing? A place that has been steadily low for a decade is a better bet than one that had a great 2025.

Step 4: Don't Rank One City Against Another

The "most dangerous cities" lists you find online do something the FBI itself tells people not to do. The bureau's own guidance on the proper use of its statistics says, in its words, "Data users should not rank locales because there are many factors that cause the nature and type of crime to vary from place to place."

The main problem is city limits. One city's boundary takes in its quiet suburbs, and another's stops at the old downtown. The first looks safe and the second looks dangerous, even if the two metro areas are alike. A second problem is that police only count what people tell them. The Justice Department's yearly victimization survey found that in 2024 fewer than half of violent crimes were reported to police, and places differ in how willing people are to call.

Use the agency's numbers to compare a place with its own past. Be careful using them to compare it with somewhere else.

Step 5: Cross-Check With Death Records

One kind of safety data does not depend on anyone calling the police: death certificates. Every homicide, firearm death and fatal injury is recorded by a medical examiner or coroner and counted by the CDC, whether or not the local department sent anything to the FBI. County Health Rankings publishes those rates for counties, averaged over several years so that small places don't swing wildly.

This is the data behind the safety grade on every BoomTownIndex county page and behind our ranking of the safest counties in America. The grade is based on the county's homicide rate, with firearm and injury death rates shown beside it. If the police numbers and the death records agree, you can trust the picture. If the police numbers look wonderful and the death records don't, believe the death records. We explain the gap between the two in crime reports vs. death records.

Death records have limits too, and you should know them before leaning on them:

• They cover the whole county. A county rate can't tell a calm suburb from a rough few blocks inside it.
• They run a few years behind. The pooled average includes years well before 2025, so the recent national drop is only partly in it yet.
• Many small counties have no rate at all. In the 2025 County Health Rankings file, 1,727 of 3,152 counties have no published homicide rate, because the count is too small to report. For those places the absence is itself good news about homicide, and the injury death rate is the number to read.

What Each Source Is Good For

What the Record Drop Does and Doesn't Change

The 2025 drop is real, but it mostly changes the places that had the most crime to lose. The places at the top of a safest-counties list were already near the floor, so a national improvement barely moves them. That is why the same parts of the map keep showing up, a pattern we look at in why America's safest counties cluster in the North. The exact order near the top is another matter, since tiny differences reshuffle it every year, as covered in why the "safest county in America" keeps changing.

For a mover, the useful part of the news is the direction over several years, not the single year. Our list of counties where safety is improving fastest and its opposite, counties where crime is rising, both use change since 2015 for that reason. Safety is also only one of the things worth checking before a move. The rest of the short list is in what to look for when moving to a new city.

So here is the 20-minute version. Find the agency that covers the address. Pull up its last five years in the Crime Data Explorer and distrust any year that looks too good. Then open the county's page and read the homicide and injury death rates. If all three tell the same story, you know what you need to know about that place.