The crime rate in Cleveland, Ohio is among the highest of any major U.S. city, but the trend is moving in the right direction. In 2024, the city recorded roughly 1,550 violent crime victims and 4,446 property crime victims per 100,000 residents, both figures well above state and national averages. Homicides, robberies, car thefts, and burglaries all fell in 2024, and the declines accelerated in 2025.
The Current Numbers
Cleveland’s crime burden breaks into two broad categories. Violent crime covers homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Property crime covers burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. In 2024, the combined rate came out near 60 crimes per 1,000 people.
Homicide is where the gap with the rest of the country shows most clearly. The Cleveland Department of Public Health’s 2023 Violence and Injury Report put the city’s homicide rate at 38.6 per 100,000 residents, compared with a national average of 8.2 per 100,000.1City of Cleveland. 2023 Violence and Injury Report The city ended 2024 with 105 homicides, a 39% drop from 2023 and its lowest total in five years. That works out to roughly 35 per 100,000.
Other violent categories moved the same direction in 2024. Robberies fell 12%. Felonious assaults, which include non-fatal shootings, fell 8%, continuing a decline from the pandemic-era peak of 3,061 incidents in 2021 down to 2,468 in 2024.
Property crime is the larger share of Cleveland’s total volume. Motor vehicle theft has been one of the most visible pieces: stolen cars declined 21% in 2024 after years of increases, but Cleveland still ranks among the worst major cities for auto theft, with more than 3,600 cars reported stolen in a recent 12-month period by one local analysis. Residential burglaries also dropped meaningfully in 2024.
How Cleveland Stacks Up Against Other Cities
Nationally, violent crime fell an estimated 4.5% in 2024 and property crime fell 8.1%, with motor vehicle theft down 18.6%.2Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI Releases 2024 Reported Crimes in the Nation Statistics3Federal Bureau of Investigation. UCR Summary of Reported Crimes in the Nation, 2024 Cleveland benefited from the same trend but started from a much higher baseline, so its rates stayed well above average even after the drop.
A direct comparison makes the point. Washington D.C. recorded 926 violent crime victims per 100,000 in the same period. Cleveland’s rate was about 1,550. Cleveland also exceeded D.C.’s property crime rate, 4,446 versus 3,588 per 100,000. Within Ohio, Cleveland leads by a wide margin; most Ohio communities report rates that are a fraction of the city’s. In the national picture, Cleveland sits closer to Detroit, St. Louis, and Memphis than to its Ohio peers.
One caveat worth keeping in mind: city-to-city comparisons aren’t perfectly precise. Reporting cultures, policing strategies, and how departments classify assaults all differ. Population denominators can also distort rates in cities with large commuter populations. The gap between Cleveland and most other places is real, but exact rankings deserve some skepticism.
2025 Trends
The declines accelerated in 2025. Mayor Justin Bibb and Police Chief Dorothy Todd reported the following year-over-year drops:
- Homicides down 16%
- Rape down 28%
- Motor vehicle theft down 26%
- Robbery down 24%
- Felony assault down 15%
- Burglary down 14%
City officials credit the Raising Investment in Safety Initiative, a program combining targeted enforcement with community-based violence intervention. Police recruitment also surged, with cadet applications up 356%. Two consecutive years of broad declines across nearly every category is the most encouraging trend Cleveland has seen in more than a decade. Whether the gains hold will depend on sustained staffing and investment.
The Citywide Rate Hides Huge Neighborhood Differences
If you’re evaluating safety for a move, a job, or a visit, the citywide number is the wrong one to rely on. A handful of high-crime neighborhoods pull the average up significantly, and risk at the block level looks very different from the aggregate.
Cleveland’s safer neighborhoods include areas like Kamm’s Corners, Old Brooklyn East, and the University Circle district near Case Western Reserve University. Crime in those areas runs dramatically lower than in the hardest-hit parts of the city. Certain neighborhoods on the East Side have historically experienced violent crime rates many times the city average.
Policing and the End of Federal Oversight
Cleveland’s crime trajectory is tied to a decade of court-supervised police reform that is now ending. In 2015, after a Department of Justice investigation found a pattern of unreasonable force, the city entered a federal consent decree requiring reforms to use of force, searches and seizures, crisis intervention, misconduct investigations, and community policing.4Department of Justice. Justice Department Seeks to Terminate Federal Oversight of Cleveland Police Department
On February 19, 2026, the DOJ and the City of Cleveland jointly filed a motion to terminate the decree. The independent federal monitoring team awarded the city 144 compliance upgrades across seven assessments.5City of Cleveland. City of Cleveland, United States Department of Justice File Motion to Terminate Consent Decree The motion still needs court approval.
Staffing remains a question. As of late 2025, the Cleveland Division of Police had 1,254 uniformed officers including cadets. A city of Cleveland’s size, roughly 370,000 people, would need around 888 officers to match the national average of 2.4 sworn officers per 1,000 residents. Cleveland exceeds that on paper, though the functional patrol count depends on how many officers are in training, on leave, or in administrative roles.
Where to Check Crime Data for Your Address
Three sources cover most of what you’d want to look up. The Cleveland Division of Police operates a public crime map built on ArcGIS that displays recent incidents and lets you search by address or neighborhood; it is the most practical tool for understanding risk at the block level. The Cleveland Department of Public Health publishes an annual Violence and Injury Report with homicide, assault, and emergency department data broken out by demographics.6City of Cleveland. 2024 Violence and Injury Report For federal data, the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer includes Cleveland’s submissions, though expect a lag of a year or more.
Keep in mind that all of these sources count only crimes reported to police. National victim surveys consistently show higher violent crime rates than police-report data because many incidents are never reported.7Bureau of Justice Statistics. The Nations Two Crime Measures 2015-2024 Cleveland’s official statistics are the best available picture, but they are a floor rather than a complete count.