This Is The American City With The Most Robberies

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 28, 9:05AM EDT

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This Is The American City With The Most Robberies — © UmerPK / iStock Editorial via Getty Images

Although robbery is a crime that can happen anywhere, your chances of becoming a victim go up depending on which city, town, village or Census designated place you may be in.

Robbery is “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 putting the victim in fear,” according to the FBI. This crime can occur in a person’s home or anyplace a person might go, like stores, bus stops, sidewalks, schools, parks or offices.

Often, but not always, robbery can be a “crime of opportunity” — a matter of the victim being at the wrong place at the wrong time. The New York Times reports that during the pandemic police have seen an increase in armed robberies of delivery workers and that the robbers often make off with the worker’s bicycle.

Baltimore, Maryland is the U.S. city with the highest robbery rate, according to FBI statistics for 2019. Robberies in 2019 were at a rate of 813 per 100,000 people, for a total figure of 4,856. Its share of total robberies in Maryland was 52.8% of 5,681. The poverty rate in 2019 was 21.2%. The median household income in Baltimore in 2019 was $50,379.

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Rounding out the top five riskiest cities for this crime are Oakland, Calif.; Cleveland; St. Louis; and Atlantic City, N.J.

California is the state with the most cities on the list of the top 50 places where you are most at risk of being robbed, with 15. New Jersey is second with 7 cities on the list. Florida and Pennsylvania have 3 each.

To determine the cities with the most robberies, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed property crime data from the FBI’s 2019 Uniform Crime Report. We ranked cities based on the number of property crimes reported per 100,000 residents. We considered all cities, towns, villages, and Census designated places home to at least 20,000 people in our analysis. Alabama and Hawaii did not have sufficient crime data at the city level and were excluded from our analysis. Data on poverty rate came from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and are five-year averages for 2019.

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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.