Special Report

Scranton, Pennsylvania Is One of the Cities Where Violent Crime is Soaring

Samuel Stebbins

Published: February 21, 2021 10:00 am

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, there were 1.2 million violent crimes — murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults — committed in the United States in 2019, the most recent year of available data. The national crime rate of 367 incidents for every 100,000 Americans is almost exactly in line with where it was five years ago.

A handful of major metropolitan areas have not followed the national trend, however. In dozens of U.S. cities, the population-adjusted annual violent crime rate is over 20% higher than it was five years ago.

In the Scranton–Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania metro area, the violent crime rate has surged by 77.0% in the last five years. A total of 2,220 violent crimes were reported in the area in 2019, or 401 for every 100,000 people. As recently as 2014, the violent crime rate in the metro area stood at 227 per 100,000 people.

Of the four broad classifications of violent crime, the population-adjusted rate of aggravated assault increased the most, climbing by 133.5% in the last half decade.

Not all cities that reported substantial increases in violence are particularly dangerous. Scranton, however, is. The violent crime rate in the metro area is considerably higher than the national rate.

It is important to note that in the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic appears to have had an impact on crime patterns in the United States. Preliminary data from major cities across the country reveal a decline in crime during the pandemic, despite an uptick in shootings and killings. Exactly how these trends will impact the overall violent crime rate both in Scranton. Here is a look at 17 non-obvious ways life has changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

24/7 Wall St. reviewed data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. We ranked cities based on the percentage increase in violent crimes — which include murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault — per 100,000 residents from 2014 to 2019. Data on population also came from the FBI. Supplemental data on poverty came from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey. Data on unemployment came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.