The FBI has not yet completed its uniform crime reporting statistics for 2021 but has done so for 2020. For 2020, the first year of the lockdown, the FBI’s crime data explorer and data discovery tool indicate that NM had substantially higher crime stats than the national averages. For all violent crime, NM had 778.3 per 100,000 compared to a national average of 398.5 per 100,000. For all property crime it was 2841.9 to 1958.2 and for motor vehicle theft it was 427.6 to 246. 

I was curious about the stats for NM’s five largest cities, and how they compared to that of El Paso. All of the crime stats were from the crime data explorer and the data discovery tool. I searched the state and used the local agency search query for the police department stats in each of the six cities. For population figures I used census estimates from July 1, 2020 and rounded to the nearest thousand. To determine the per 100,000 number I divided the crime statistic by the city population and multiplied that number by 100,000.  Here are the results.

FBI Crime Stats for 2020

The crime stats for Albuquerque and Rio Rancho jump off the page - in a bad way for Albuquerque and in a good way for Rio Rancho. It may not be completely fair to compare Albuquerque to the four other NM cities because it is so much larger but it is fair to compare it to El Paso. Albuquerque’s all violent crime stats are 417% higher than El Paso’s, its all-property crimes are 397% higher and its stolen vehicle figures are an astonishing 1440% higher. 

Charles Sullivan is a retired attorney who has lived in NM for over 40 years.