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Which US city had the highest violent crime rate per 100,000 residents in 2024 according to the FBI UCR?
Executive Summary
Memphis, Tennessee, recorded the highest violent crime rate per 100,000 residents in the FBI’s 2024 Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) city-level dataset, with a reported rate of roughly 2,501 violent crimes per 100,000 people, according to published rankings drawn from the FBI data; Oakland, California, was the next highest among large cities at about 1,925 per 100,000 [1] [2]. The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer is the authoritative repository for those UCR figures, and multiple secondary compilations and news analyses published in 2024–2025 reached the same conclusion while noting methodological caveats about city size thresholds and reporting differences [3] [4] [5].
1. Why Memphis tops the list and what the numbers actually show
The most consistent and direct claim across analyses is that Memphis topped U.S. cities in violent crime rate per 100,000 residents in 2024, with the figure cited most often as 2,501.28 (rounded to 2,501.3 in some summaries). Secondary rankings that extracted city-level data from the FBI’s UCR and republished a list of cities with populations above 50,000 show Memphis well ahead of the next-highest municipalities, indicating a substantial gap rather than a narrow lead [1] [2]. These compilations are explicit that they are using the FBI’s reported counts and population denominators to compute rates; the FBI’s own digital portal, the Crime Data Explorer (CDE), is the primary source of the underlying reported offenses and population figures [3] [4]. That direct link to UCR data underpins the conclusion that Memphis had the highest violent crime rate among qualifying American cities in 2024 [1].
2. How other cities compare and the scale of the gap
Rankings extracted from FBI figures place Oakland, California, as the second-highest large city by violent crime rate at about 1,925.33 per 100,000, illustrating that Memphis’s rate sits substantially above other major urban centers listed in the same dataset [1]. Media and analysis outlets that reported on the FBI release highlighted the magnitude: Memphis’s reported rate was described as roughly six times the national violent crime rate reported in the same period—359.1 per 100,000—a contrast used to contextualize the concentrated severity in a small set of jurisdictions [2]. Those same accounts also named Detroit and Baltimore among cities with high violent-crime rates, but they remained behind Memphis and Oakland in the 2024 city-level UCR rankings as presented by these secondary compilers [5] [2].
3. Where the FBI fits in and why some sources are circumspect
The FBI’s UCR, accessible through its Crime Data Explorer, is the official federal compilation of law-enforcement–reported crimes and is the dataset cited by the analyses that identify Memphis as highest for 2024; several FBI pages and program descriptions explain that city-level results are published and that the CDE is the public interface for those quarterly releases [3] [6] [4]. Some source summaries and program pages included in the analyses do not themselves list city-by-city rankings when they describe the UCR program, prompting secondary outlets to extract and compute rates from the raw CDE tables; that step explains why a news ranking or third-party “Beautify Data” presentation is often referenced in tandem with the FBI release [3] [1] [4]. Those procedural notes are important because they clarify that the headline ranking rests on reported offenses and the FBI’s published population denominators rather than independent victimization surveys.
4. Methodological caveats and alternative interpretations to consider
The claim that Memphis had the highest violent crime rate is robust within the UCR city-level framework used by the cited analyses, but several key caveats matter when interpreting the headline. First, the rankings typically limit comparison to cities above a population threshold (commonly 50,000), which excludes smaller municipalities where rates can be volatile; the analyses that report Memphis as highest specify this scope [1]. Second, UCR data reflect crimes reported to and recorded by local law enforcement agencies; differences in reporting practices, classification, and law-enforcement coverage can change city rankings even if underlying victimization trends are similar. Third, some summary sources referenced do not themselves publish the raw city tables but instead repackaged FBI figures, so readers should trace back to the CDE release for verification [1] [4].
5. Final synthesis: what’s firmly established and what still needs careful reading
Firmly established across the available analyses is that, using the FBI UCR city-level counts and population denominators for 2024 as published or repackaged by data compilations and media outlets, Memphis is the highest large U.S. city by violent crime rate (≈2,501 per 100K), with Oakland and other historically high-rate cities trailing [1] [2] [5]. The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer is the authoritative source for verification and for exploring breakdowns by offense type, jurisdiction, and population threshold [3] [4]. Readers seeking to drill into methodology should retrieve the underlying CDE tables and note population cutoffs and reporting differences before drawing broader policy or causal conclusions from the headline ranking [3] [4] [1].