This Is The American Town With The Most Robberies

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 27, 8:59AM EST

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

This Is The American Town With The Most Robberies — © dougtone / Flickr

“Robbery”– “the taking or attempting to take anything of value from the care, custody, or control of a person or persons by force or threat of force or violence and/or by putting the victim in fear.”–FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program.

The largest share of robberies in the United States are committed on streets or sidewalks. Handguns are the most commonly used weapon in robberies, and more often than not, among the cases where a suspect has been identified, the offender and victim are strangers to one another.

Despite the long-term decline in robberies nationwide, there were still nearly a quarter of a million robbery cases reported in the U.S. in 2020, accounting for about 19% of all reported violent crimes — and in some parts of the country, robbery is far more common than average.

Using data from the FBI’s 2020 Uniform Crime Report, 24/7 Wall St. identified the town with the most robberies. To pick it, towns are ranked by their robbery rate — specifically, the number of reported robberies for every 100,000 residents. We defined towns based on population thresholds — having at least 2,500 people and less than 25,000 people.

[nativounit]

Robbery is only one of four broad categories of violent crime — along with rаpe, aggravated assault, and homicide — and every town on this list also has a higher than average overall violent crime rate.

The town with the most robberies is Salem, New Jersey. Here are the details:

> Robberies per 100k people: 579.3
> Number of robberies: 27 — 43rd highest of 3,612 towns (tied)
> Violent crimes per 100k people: 2,059.6 — 10th highest of 3,606 towns
> Poverty rate: 42.2% — 32nd highest of 3,612 towns
> Population within reporting jurisdiction: 4,661 — 1,039th lowest of 3,612 towns

Methodology: To determine the town with the most robberies, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed robbery figures from the FBI’s 2020 Uniform Crime Report. The rate of robberies per 100,000 people was calculated using population data from the FBI.

We defined towns based on population thresholds — having at least 2,500 people and less than 25,000 people — using five-year estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey. Limited data were available in the 2020 UCR for areas in Alabama, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, though these places were not excluded from analysis.

Additional information on the violent crime rate and the population within the jurisdictions reporting figures to the FBI are also from the 2020 FBI UCR. Poverty rates are five-year estimates from the 2019 ACS.

Click here to read American Towns With The Most Robberies

[wallst_email_signup]

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.