Stats Show Murder More Likely in San Angelo than in Austin or Fort Worth

You’re more likely to get murdered in San Angelo than in Austin, Fort Worth or Arlington, the latest crime statistics from the Texas Department of Public Safety show.

The statistics, culled from law enforcement agencies statewide on an annual basis, reveal the numbers and rates of crimes including murder, robbery, assault, burglary, theft and auto theft.

All of the rates are calculated based on population, broken down by the number of incidents in each category per 100,000 residents. In 2014, Tom Green County’s total murder rate was 4.3, which exceeded the rate in all of Tarrant County (4.1) and all of Travis County (2.8) for the same year. Tarrant County includes Fort Worth, Arlington and a number of smaller communities in between, while Travis County encompasses Austin and its outliers, such as Round Rock and Pflugerville.

Tom Green’s rate has hovered between 4.3 and 4.4 since 2012, taking a giant leap over 2010’s rate of 1.8. That rate is still far behind Ector County (Odessa), which reported a murder rate of 10.9 in 2014, far exceeding every major metroplex in the state.

To form a basis for comparison, we measured the rates in 10 Texas counties across all categories. Those counties include: Tom Green, Bexar (San Antonio), Dallas, Ector, Harris (Houston), Lubbock, Midland, Tarrant, Taylor (Abilene) and Travis.

Tom Green faired well with regard to the other nine counties in robberies, falling far behind all others at a rate of 32.5. That rate, however, is a big jump over the year prior, when the reported rate was 26.2. Robberies had been on the decline since 2010 (49.8), but leapt up again in 2014. The worst of those we measured was Harris County, whose rate is 316.1. Midland’s rate was closest to San Angelo at 45.9.

Also on the rise in Tom Green County is the rate of aggravated assault, which in 2014 equated to 213 incidents per 100,000 residents. The rate has been fluctuating over the past few years, lowering a few points and then leaping 15-20. In 2014 the rate increased by 16 incidents, and you were more likely to get assaulted in Tom Green County than in Dallas (197.8).  Ector County was again alarmingly high at 743.7

The most shocking of the statistics, however, showed in the rate of San Angelo burglaries (814.4), which exceed Odessa’s rate (725.7) by a fairly large margin. In fact, San Angelo’s rate is so high it beat every major metroplex in the state, falling only behind Taylor and Lubbock counties for the highest burglary rate. Tom Green’s burglary rate spiked significantly from 2013 to 2014, increasing by nearly 20 points from 705.6 in 2013 and 754.2 in 2012.

Despite the extremely high rate of burglaries in Tom Green County, the rate of theft incidents has dropped quite a bit, down to 2,492.9 in 2014 from 2,578.3 in 2013. The rate is still well above Dallas, Tarrant and Midland counties. Auto thefts, by comparison, have risen steadily since 2012, but is only higher than Tarrant County.

Below are the statistics from the DPS report for 2014. Rates are calculated by incidents per 100,000 residents. Numbers from 2010-2014 for Tom Green County have been added for reference.