Columbus Crime Statistics

Finding accurate Columbus crime statistics can be difficult. The FBI uses its Uniform Crime Reporting to gather comparable data on every city. Unfortunately, not all cities report accurately or completely and the reported numbers don’t always match up. For example, Columbus police reported 111 homicides in 2018, but only 110 of them are listed in the UCR data. This likely has something to do with the way that the UCR classifies homicides versus the way the city does, or because the city later updated numbers after reporting to the UCR. This is most common with the murder data, as sometimes victims die in a different year than they were injured in, or from events retroactively adding to past years. Additionally, what is reported to US by police departments does not include adjudication results, meaning they may have reported an incident as a crime that was later ruled justified in a court of law.
Having said all that, the UCR is the most consistent source and offers data back nearly 40 years for Columbus. Because of this, I have opted to use it for this page.

Click on any graph to open a larger version.

**Last Updated: 3/15/2025- Updated graphs for violent crime going back to 1985, though the homicide graph was expanded back to 1983. Additionally, new pages were broken off to more closely examine crime data from 2024 and 2023. Additional years will be added over time. This page will continue to serve as the main page for overall historic data.

2025 Homicide Tracker

2024 started off with the fewest homicides in years, and 2025 is starting off even better, down almost 24% year-over-year and down about 74% from the record that occurred in 2021. Let’s hope this continues, but a lot may depend on the state of the economy and other factors going forward.

Previous Years
2024 Crime
2023 Crime

FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Data

Violent Crime

Overall, violent crime has been on a downward trend the last 40 years. 2023 featured the lowest violent crime rate since at least 1985.

Homicides have not followed trends for most other crime types. There were two significant spikes in homicides since 1985. The first occurred 1990-1992 during the crack epidemic, and the second occurred 2020-2021 during the pandemic and its disruptions. This most recent spike, however, occurred during a consistently higher period of homicides that began in 2016. It’s unclear why homicides went up that year and have stayed generally higher since, but the transition was abrupt.

The definition of rape was significantly expanded in 2013, so the numbers after that date are generally higher than before and are not necessarily directly comparable. However, clearly this type of crime is trending in the wrong direction. 2023 had the highest total and rate since 1985.

Robberies have been trending down for years, and 2023 had the lowest rate since 1985.

Aggravated assaults have also been trending down over time, but there was a significant spike beginning in the latter half of the 2010s and peaking in 2021. The rate during the spike, however, never came close to matching the historic high in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The following date breaks down violent crime incidents by both offender and victim by race, gender and age. Because some individual crimes are committed by multiple people, the total offenders will not match total reported crimes. Offender data is available since 2004 and victim data since 2010.
Violent Crime Offenders and Victims by Age

Violent Crime Offenders and Victims by Race

Violent Crime Offenders and Victims by Gender

Property Crime

Motor vehicle thefts have been the only property crime to see an increase in recent years, and it has been a fairly massive spike. This is almost entirely attributed to thefts of Kias and Hyundais. These pushed total thefts to their highest level in 17 years in 2022, but totals and rate are still below most years between the late 1980s-about 2004.

For information on Ohio’s far too many cold cases, visit
Ohio Cold Cases
You can search cases by city, date, victim name or other information.
And for a decent interactive crime map, the 10TV 10TV Crime Tracker is one where you can search through crimes based on dates, crime types and other data.

Columbus Police Statistics
Financial Data

Physical Characteristics