Special Report

This is the City With the Most Property Crime in Montana

Samuel Stebbins

Published: February 15, 2021 10:00 am

Property crime is a category of non-violent offenses comprising three subcategories: burglary, larceny theft, and motor vehicle theft. According to the FBI, a total of 6.9 million property crimes were committed in the United States in 2019. The total value of goods stolen — ranging from clothing and jewelry to firearms and motor vehicles — is estimated $14.3 billion.

Adjusting for population, there were a total of 2,110 property crimes for every 100,000 people in the United States in 2019. Of course, crime is a highly local phenomenon, and as a result, property crime rates vary substantially from state to state and city to city.

Montana is a relatively rural state and has only six cities and towns home to at least 20,000 people where crime is tracked by the FBI. Of them, Great Falls has by far the highest property crime rate. There were 5,807 property crimes for every 100,000 people in the city in 2019, more than double the state property crime rate of 2,322 incidents per 100,000.

Larceny-theft is particularly common in Great Falls. Though the city is home to just 5.5% of the total state population, 15.5% of larcenies reported in Montana in 2019 were in Great Falls.

To determine the cities with the most property crime in every state, 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.