About CrimeTally
Reported crime rates, with the math shown
CrimeTally started with a question people ask whenever they move, buy a home or choose a school: how much crime is there here? The popular answers online are crime scores and rankings that don't show their inputs, so there is no way to check them or see what they leave out.
So Eric built CrimeTally. Look up a police agency and you get its reported crime rate, worked out from the FBI's own data, with the crime count and the population shown next to it so you can check the math yourself.
Eric builds small, single-purpose reference tools on public data. He is not a criminologist or a police officer, and CrimeTally doesn't pretend to be either. The FBI publishes what nearly every police agency reports, but it ships as a data explorer built for analysts. He built CrimeTally to turn it into an answer anyone can check.
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How it works
Every tool on CrimeTally is grounded in a documented, citable method — a published formula, an authoritative standard, or a well-established model. We don't approximate or invent numbers. If we can't cite a primary source for the logic, we don't publish the tool.
For CrimeTally specifically, every figure comes from the FBI Crime Data Explorer, a public-domain federal dataset, and every page shows the crime count and population it used. The numbers are refreshed once a year, after the FBI's release. Before a tool ships, its results are checked by hand against the FBI's own published tables.
What a rate can't tell you
A reported crime rate counts crimes that were reported to police and passed on to the FBI. It is not all crime, and it is not the risk to any one person, street or neighborhood. Some agencies report only part of a year, and some don't report at all. When that happens, the page says so instead of filling the gap with an estimate.
CrimeTally doesn't rank places. The FBI itself warns against using its data to rank cities, because a rate leaves out most of what makes two places different. You can put two agencies side by side, with the inputs for both shown. You won't find a “safest” or “most dangerous” list here.
Our commitments
- Free, no sign-up required. Every tool on this site is free to use with no account, subscription, or paywall.
- We show our work. Every tool explains its methodology, cites its sources, and surfaces assumptions — so you can verify the logic, not just trust the output.
- Honest about limitations. Where precision is limited or assumptions are required, we say so. Tools compute; they don't replace professional judgment.
- Kept current. Tools that use figures that can change over time carry a “last reviewed” date and are treated as an ongoing maintenance responsibility, not a one-time build.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, or suggestions: hello@crimetally.com. Eric reads every message personally.