Where Reported Crime and Lethal Violence Tell Different Stories
Two measures of the same thing, collected in completely different ways. Where a place stands high on one and low on the other, the gap is worth looking at — not because one figure is wrong, but because they are counting different things.
Across 762 cities where both measures exist, the crime a police department records and the killings a coroner records agree at a correlation of 0.28 — close enough to confirm they are measuring related things, loose enough that 412 of them sit more than twenty percentile points apart. Those disagreements are the interesting part.
The two are collected in ways that share no machinery. Reported crime depends on someone calling the police, an officer writing it up, and the department submitting a return to the FBI. A death certificate is filed regardless of any of that. Where the two diverge sharply, the question is which mechanism is bending — and the direction of the gap usually says.
Key findings
- Council Bluffs, IA reports violent crime in the 86th percentile while the county around it sits at the 0th for homicide — the widest gap in that direction.
- Johns Creek, GA runs the other way: homicide at the 97th percentile against reported violent crime at the 5th.
- 350 of 762 cities sit within twenty percentile points on both — the largest single group, and the backdrop against which the outliers are worth naming.
High reported crime, low lethal violence
A city can record a great deal of crime without much of it being deadly. Dense retail districts, a large daytime population and a department that records diligently all push reported offenses up without touching the homicide rate. This is the pattern of a place where a lot is reported, not necessarily a place where a lot happens to residents.
| City | Violent /100k | County homicide /100k | Crime pct | Homicide pct | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Council Bluffs, IA | 525 | 0.0 | 86 | 0 | +86 |
| Fall River, MA | 768 | 1.6 | 94 | 10 | +84 |
| Lowell, MA | 505 | 0.9 | 85 | 4 | +81 |
| Schenectady, NY | 705 | 1.8 | 93 | 15 | +78 |
| Lynn, MA | 561 | 1.7 | 88 | 11 | +77 |
| Green Bay, WI | 450 | 1.0 | 81 | 5 | +76 |
| Cambridge, MA | 436 | 0.9 | 80 | 4 | +76 |
| San Jose, CA | 505 | 1.6 | 85 | 10 | +75 |
| Grand Island, NE | 386 | 0.0 | 75 | 0 | +75 |
| Mount Vernon, NY | 496 | 1.6 | 84 | 10 | +74 |
| National City, CA | 637 | 1.9 | 91 | 17 | +74 |
| Caldwell, ID | 482 | 1.5 | 83 | 9 | +74 |
| Jersey City, NJ | 487 | 1.7 | 84 | 11 | +73 |
| Santa Cruz, CA | 533 | 1.8 | 87 | 15 | +72 |
| Lakewood, CO | 675 | 2.0 | 92 | 20 | +72 |
Low reported crime, high lethal violence
The reverse is the more troubling shape. Homicide is the hardest crime to leave unrecorded, so a county with a high homicide rate and a city inside it reporting little violent crime raises a question about the reporting rather than about the killings. It can also be geography: the county figure covers everywhere, and the deaths may simply not be happening in this particular city.
| City | Violent /100k | County homicide /100k | Crime pct | Homicide pct | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Johns Creek, GA | 40 | 13.7 | 5 | 97 | +92 |
| Orland Park, IL | 9 | 10.8 | 1 | 91 | +90 |
| Hoover, AL | 66 | 16.4 | 12 | 98 | +86 |
| Arlington Heights, IL | 43 | 10.8 | 6 | 91 | +85 |
| Mount Prospect, IL | 56 | 10.8 | 10 | 91 | +81 |
| Schaumburg, IL | 68 | 10.8 | 13 | 91 | +78 |
| Lakewood, OH | 81 | 11.8 | 17 | 94 | +77 |
| Oak Lawn, IL | 73 | 10.8 | 15 | 91 | +76 |
| Hoffman Estates, IL | 75 | 10.8 | 15 | 91 | +76 |
| Palatine, IL | 85 | 10.8 | 18 | 91 | +73 |
| Lee's Summit, MO | 111 | 15.0 | 25 | 98 | +73 |
| Savannah, GA | 86 | 10.5 | 18 | 91 | +73 |
| Roswell, GA | 111 | 13.7 | 25 | 97 | +72 |
| Sandy Springs, GA | 114 | 13.7 | 26 | 97 | +71 |
| Tinley Park, IL | 93 | 10.8 | 20 | 91 | +71 |
These measure different things and the mismatch is partly built in: offenses against deaths, a city police department against the county around it. A county can hold both a dense center and a quiet suburb, so a city with genuinely little violence can sit inside a county with a high homicide rate through no property of its own. That is why this compares standings rather than declaring one figure wrong, and why AreaProfile scores neither.
Methodology
Two independent measures are compared for every city where both exist: violent offenses reported to the FBI by the city police department, and homicide deaths recorded on death certificates for the county around it. Both are converted to national percentiles among places that have them, and the gap between the two percentiles is the subject. A city is included only where its department reported all twelve months of the year, so incomplete reporting cannot manufacture a divergence. The two measure genuinely different things — offenses against deaths, city against county — so a gap is not by itself evidence of error, and the report describes which way each one runs rather than asserting a cause.
Sources
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime Data Explorer — Summarized offense counts by law enforcement agency (Uniform Crime Reporting, through 2025)
- U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics — Provisional county-level mortality by intent (Mapping Injury, Overdose and Violence — county)
Related
Every figure here is recalculated from the same measurements the profiles use. See the methodology for how the underlying data is collected and normalized, and the editorial policy for how these reports are written.