Tennessee data on violent crime and arrests

Violent crime in Tennessee

In 2024, 592 violent crime incidents per 100,000 residents were reported to police in Tennessee. This is 3 percent lower than the violent crime rate in 2014.

The crime rate in Tennessee in 2024 was 65 percent higher than the United States average.

Data regarding crime and solve rates come from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. Violent crime includes homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, and rape. Crime rates are calculated by dividing the number of estimated incidents by the total population for a given geography. For more information, see the data sources and methodology section below.

Solved violent crime in Tennessee

In 2024, 42 percent of violent crimes reported to police in Tennessee were solved. This is 6 percentage points lower than the solve rate in 2014.

Solve rates are the number of reported crimes cleared by arrest or by exceptional means divided by the number of reported crimes. For more information, see the data sources and methodology section below.

Solved violent crime by county in Tennessee

Solved violent crime by agency in Tennessee

In the following table, violent crime incident rates, as well as violent crime solve rates, are included for each of the 347 law enforcement agencies that reported data in Tennessee in 2024. Violent crime solve rates by offense differ across agencies across the state. The average solve rate for aggravated assault is 45 percent. Homicide is 56 percent, and rape is 36 percent.

Please note that rates calculated for agencies with smaller jurisdiction populations, as well as fewer overall incidents, are less reliable than those for larger jurisdictions and should be interpreted with caution.

Orange indicates a solve rate less than the state average.

Blue indicates a solve rate greater than or equal to the state average.

Law enforcement resources in Tennessee

Tennessee increased spending on law enforcement by 27 percent from 2013 to 2023, adjusting for inflation. Expenditures include local, state, and federal spending on local police departments, sheriffs’ offices, and state police agencies such as highway patrols and other state investigative law enforcement agencies.

Law enforcement resources also refer to the state’s staffing per 10,000 residents and per 1,000 violent crimes. These factors may show the level of policing a community receives, potentially influencing both crime and solve rates.

Additionally, the number of officers per 1k violent crimes in Tennessee has decreased by 6 percent from 2013 to 2023. This decrease may be due to a combination of a decrease in law enforcement officers and/or an increase in reported violent crimes.

Law enforcement staffing can impact how agencies allocate resources to solve violent crime. For example, severe staff shortages can reduce investigative personnel or increase the number of cases that individual officers are managing.

Exploration of homicide solve rates in Tennessee

Explore homicide solve rates by available victim demographics and case characteristics for Tennessee and other states in the CSG Southern Region. Grouping states by region allows policymakers to compare their state to others that may be similar. Solve rates are included by race and ethnicity, gender, age, weapon type, and number of victims. For more information, see the data sources and methodology below.


Data regarding crime and solve rates come from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. Counts of reported violent crime between 2013 and 2023 are derived from the Summary Reporting System (SRS) and the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The FBI generated national estimates for reported crime and clearances based on agency-level reports, and these estimates were published through 2023 in the FBI’s annual report, Crime in the U.S., and on the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer. For agency-level clearance data, we used Jacob Kaplan’s version of the Offenses Known and Clearances by Arrest dataset.

The FBI stopped SRS data collection after data year 2020 and required law enforcement agencies to use NIBRS to report crime statistics to the FBI. This change decreased the number of agencies that submitted their crime data and thus reduced the reliability of state estimates in 2021. In 2022 and 2023, the FBI allowed agencies who were unable to submit NIBRS data to submit SRS data again. Ninety-four percent of the U.S. population was covered in the 2023 crime data submissions to the FBI, with most states providing close to complete data. However, the population upon which the estimates were derived decreased by over 10 percent in three states: Florida, Mississippi, and Wyoming, so conclusions about crime changes in those states should be interpreted with additional caution.

Crime rates are calculated by dividing the number of estimated incidents by the total U.S. population. Population data come from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 1-year estimates (table B01003) and the 2020 Decennial Census Redistricting Data (table P1).

Solve rates are the number of reported crimes cleared by arrest or by exceptional means divided by the number of reported crimes. A reported crime incident is cleared by exceptional means if a law enforcement agency is unable to arrest or formally charge a person with a crime, but the agency has met the following conditions:

  1. Identified the person who committed the crime
  2. Gathered enough evidence to support an arrest, make a charge, and turn over the person to the court for prosecution
  3. Identified the suspect’s exact location so that the person could be taken into custody immediately
  4. Encountered a circumstance outside the control of law enforcement that prohibits the agency from arresting, charging, and prosecuting the person

Examples of exceptional clearances include the death of the person who committed the crime; the victim’s refusal to cooperate with the prosecution after the person who committed the crime has been identified; or the denial of extradition.

In some instances, the solve rate and number of solved crimes may be less than 0. This is due to the fact that the number of reported crimes cleared in a year can include incidents reported in prior years. For this reason, it is possible to have more cleared crimes than new reported incidents in a given year.

Agency- and county-level violent crime and solve rate data presented above are restricted to agencies reporting data for all 12 months in 2024. The calculation of population covered by reporting agencies, as well as the number of reporting agencies by county, is also based on agencies with violent crime data for all 12 months.

Each law enforcement agency is grouped by the county where they are based using the Law Enforcement Agency Identifiers Crosswalk developed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2012. The overall county population used for calculation of county-level rates is based on the sum of the jurisdiction populations for agencies reporting data for all 12 months in 2024.

Counties with fewer than 25 reported violent incidents in 2024 are excluded from the map, as calculations of solve rates are not reliable.

Data regarding state law enforcement expenditures were downloaded from the U.S. Census Bureau Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances.

Officer employment analysis is restricted to sworn law enforcement officers and was downloaded from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program police employee data files.

Data on homicide solve rate trends and case characteristics come from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reporting (SHR) Program.