What is the Cincinnati Ohio crime rate? Is it a safe place to live? If you’re thinking about moving across the country with your family, you want to know, can I live in this place? Is there high crime? Are my kids gonna be safe? We’re gonna talk about all that and more! My name is Eric Sztanyo from Keller Williams Realty and Teamsztanyo.com where we are helping you find your home and strengthen your family. Today we wanna talk about the Cincinnati Ohio crime rate, and maybe more importantly, we wanna talk about crime in the Cincinnati Metro. Those things can tend to be skewed a little bit. We wanna look into both of those statistics and help you understand, is Cincinnati Ohio a safe place to live? This is a question we frequently get from clients who are moving here from another state. “Hey, is it safe to live there? “And I’ve gotta be honest and do a disclaimer before kind of making this. Look, I am a licensed realtor in Ohio and Kentucky, and we have to abide by certain rules in terms of steering, in terms of making sure we’re not pushing our clients to certain neighborhoods or not.
What is The Cincinnati Ohio Crime Rate Compared to Other Cities?
I’m gonna try to give some statistics and give you a feel of the general crime rate here. But ultimately you’ve gotta make that decision up for you. Whatever your tolerance is for a crime neighborhood. If you’re looking at a heat map for a crime and it’s green or yellow or red, what does that mean for you? Are you okay living there? That’s up to you. I’m gonna point you to some third-party resources that you can check out these rates for yourself. But on a bigger picture, I just wanna show you kind of where Cincinnati stacks up nationally and what are the trends we’re seeing in Cincinnati when it comes to crime.
Now, if you’ve done the research yourself online, you may have found that Cincinnati ranks a little bit lower on the list in terms of crime rates in the city itself. In fact, if you look over at this article, which is published on the Reno Gazette-Journal, but was actually from the Wall Street Journal, this is back in 2019, so a few years ago, but it mentions that the Midwest is home to many of America’s most dangerous cities. And there’s an ominous picture of a woman walking down the streets being stalked by a potential rapist, which doesn’t look super fun.
But if you go down this list, you’ll see that Cincinnati out of 50 cities is ranked 48. Not super great. In 2018, the violent crime rate was 839.5 per 100,000 people. There were 57 homicides. The poverty rate is 28.7%. The unemployment rate was 4.5%. It says that Cincinnati is one of five Ohio cities to rank among the most dangerous cities nationwide. Aggravated assault was the most commonly reported violent crime in the city in 2018 with 1,288 incidents followed by robbery with 897 reported incidents. Now, one thing I want to point out before we’re going on further in this video is every city’s gonna have crime. You’re not gonna escape that. And to do your research, what we recommend is actually reaching out to the local police department and we’ll put a link in the description. But there’s a really good website here, which is insights.Cincinnati-OH.gov. Which is going to give you a neighborhood-by-neighborhood breakdown of the different crimes in Cincinnati.
Now, again, I’m not gonna break it down neighborhood by neighborhood, I don’t think that’s my job to do. If you want to do that research, the resource is there for you. But as realtors, our job is not to steer you into any one particular place cuz you might have different tolerances for what you want for crime. And we’re not trying to discriminate against any one neighborhood. The data is the data. You can look it up and you can make a decision for yourself.
Now, going back to Cincinnati being ranked 48th out of 50 on the list, one thing I wanna make sure you do when you’re doing your research is don’t compare just the city of Cincinnati boundaries. Make sure you’re comparing the the Cincinnati Metro area and just us metros in general apples to apples there. If trying to find Cincinnati Ohio crime rate and you’re looking at crime rates of cities nationwide, you’re gonna typically find higher crime rates in the core of the city.
But if you zoom out a little bit of Cincinnati, you might get a little bit clearer picture about is it safe to live in the city or not. The Cincinnati metropolitan area is also known as the tri-state area because it composes counties in Cincinnati, Ohio, usually Hamilton, Warren Butler, Claremont, but also Northern Kentucky. So Boone, Kenton, and Campbell Counties, and even Southeast Indiana. So the metropolitan of Cincinnati’s greater than just the Cincinnati boundary itself. If you guys jump over to this website, crime grade.org, you can kind of see a heat map that’s gonna show you the safest and most dangerous places in the Cincinnati Metro. So if you’re looking at the map, again, you can dig down into these areas of yellow and orange and look at the individual statistics of Cincinnati Ohio crime rates in these areas. But make sure if you’re looking at the entire Cincinnati metro, you’re also seeing a lot of green on this map as well.
So just looking at this map, you can see a lot of the areas we’ve talked about and done videos on in terms of a lot of the new construction. As you’re getting out into more of the burbs, there’s gonna be a lot less crime out in these areas. So Mason, Ohio, Westchester, Loveland, Milford Anderson Township, which is in the southeast part of the city in Kentucky and Alexandria and Independence, Burlington, Florence, and Union, Kentucky. These are areas with lower crime rates overall. So I’d encourage you, when you’re looking at these lists of crimes, you’re not just looking at the city of Cincinnati boundary, but you’re looking at these metro areas. If you jump over to this website, best places.net, it has the America’s best and worst cities for crime.
The cities listed here are the 100 largest metropolitan statistical areas as defined by the US Census Bureau. And generally, the MSAs are defined as a central city and its county and possibly surrounding counties. if a significant portion of the area’s population commutes between the counties on a regular basis.
So these 100 largest metro areas are ranked in order from least to most crime, and they’re including murder and rape, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny, and auto theft. So some of these cities, which are actually surprising to me at the top here, Boston, or in New York, maybe it’s just by the pure number of people that are in these cities. San Diego, Jersey City, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Washington. And then if you go down the list, Cincinnati’s ranking out of 100, about 47 on this list, and it is including Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana.
So not a huge surprise to me when I think of Cincinnati in general, where it usually ranks on list nationwide, we’re usually right about in the middle. We’re usually not the best. We’re usually not the worst. We’re right about in the middle. And this is no different. Some cities that are coming in below Cincinnati, we see Atlanta, Birmingham, Louisville, Colorado Springs, Las Vegas, Denver, St. Louis, Nashville, Orlando, Charlotte, Jacksonville, Dallas, and even Columbus, Ohio, all coming in ranked lower than Ohio on the crime index.
One more thing I wanna point out before we close up is I want to give you guys an idea of the trend of Cincinnati and what’s happened over the years. I think nationally, Cincinnati has a little bit of a bad reputation for crime. And, I kind of get that. I mean, when I was a kid growing up in the burbs of northern Kentucky, which was a very safe area, we didn’t go into the city all that much. When we did come down, it was maybe for Red’s game, then we kind of came right back to the burbs.
And I think in the 90’s and early 2000, there were some riots downtown Cincinnati that gave this kind of national reputation that this is not a safe place to live. But if you really dig into it and you look at what the leadership has done, and you look at what the Cincinnati Police Department has done over the last decade-plus, they’ve really done an excellent job of working with members in the community, doing kind of community policing and curbing these crime rates where it’s getting better and better and better in Cincinnati.
So I wanna show you guys this article that was published back in January of 2022, and it says that “Cincinnati crime is at a 10 year low even after tying the record for homicides last year.” So there’s a chart here that’s showing crime going back from 2012 all the way through 2021, and it’s showing both property crime and violent crime.
And you can see the trend going lower and lower and lower in both categories. The article reads; Crime in Cincinnati is at a 10 year low, according to new data from the police department, Lieutenant Colonel Mike John says, both violent and property crimes are down nearly 10% compared to last year.
If you just looked at where we were in 2012, the number of reported part one or violent and property crimes was close to 22,000. John Tola City Council Committee Tuesday, we have reduced that by almost 10,000 offenses. “That’s fantastic way to go.” Only two categories of crime are up at least 10% compared to the five-year average aggregated assault and auto theft. All other crimes are down, including burglary, robbery, and rape. Now, the number of shootings last year is up nearly 11% compared to the pre pandemic three year average. But the police chief Elliot Isaac says across the country, violent crime went up at the start of the pandemic.
He said, “I think when people look at 2020 and 2021, the social scientists will have a lot of work to do to really determine what the impact of this pandemic truly has been on so many facets of our way of life.”
So I think we all know the stats were probably skewed a little bit coming outta the pandemic. That was kind of a crazy time. A lot of different things were happening nationwide, but looking at this chart and seeing that the trends are consistently getting better in Cincinnati from a crime standpoint is very encouraging. And if you are worried about crime, you could always add a safe room to your home.
Help in Finding a Home For Your Family with Team Sztanyo
So guys, wrapping this up. I hope this gives you a little bit of a better picture of where Cincinnati has been, kind of where we’re at today and maybe where we’re heading in terms of these trends. I think there’s no doubt that nationwide, the brand of Cincinnati in the past was that it’s kind of a dangerous city, but I think that’s changing now and it should change when you’re looking at the actual numbers. So is there a crime that happens in Cincinnati? Yes. Are there safe neighborhoods to live in Cincinnati? Yes, of course. So this is no different than really any other city in America, but the overall trends of the city are looking good. And if you’re wondering, is this a city where I can move my family to and feel safe and put down roots, the answer is yes.
If you guys have more questions, give us a call here. We’d love to chat more and point you to the proper resources. If you’re thinking about moving to Cincinnati and need some help buying a home here, we’d love to be that team to help you guys out. If you’re thinking about making a move here and need some help with that transition and buying a home, we’d love to be your realtor of choice. Give us a call at Team Sztanyo (513) 813-6293. We’d love to help you with that transition. And if you wanna learn more about Cincinnati, make sure you watch this video right here where we talk about the pros and cons of the city. It’s a great place to live. Thank you so much we’ll see you next.