• Bibb county has highest crime rate of Georgia’s MSA counties

• Seven out of ten crime categories are at their highest rate in Bibb

• DeKalb has the state’s second highest rate, while Clarke is third

Bibb county is Georgia’s crime capital, new research has revealed.

The study, by personal injury law firm Bader Scott, analyzed the latest data from the Georgia Bureau of investigation on ten different categories of crime, including burglary, arson and murder. Each county that is part of a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) was analyzed on its total number of crimes compared against its population to reveal a rate of crimes per 1,000 people. 

Bibb emerged from the ranking as Georgia’s crime capital with a rate of 52.6 crimes per 1,000 residents. During 2022 there were a total of 8,266 crimes recorded in the county, which has a population of 156,960. The most common was larceny - theft, of which there were 3,694 incidents, while the second most common crime was aggravated assault, with 1,911 committed.

Overall, Bibb had the highest crime rate in 2022 for seven of the ten crime categories, including murder, robbert, motor vehicle theft and arson.

The Georgia county with the second highest crime rate in 2022 was DeKalb, which is home to an estimated 754,242 people, and saw 30,396 crimes recorded over the year. That equates to a rate of 40.3 crimes per 1,000 people. The county had the second highest rate of robbery and motor vehicle theft, as well as the third highest rates of burglary and larceny - theft.

Clarke county has Georgia’s third highest crime rate, on 35.5 crimes per 1,000 people, based on 4,599 offenses in 2022, and a population of 129,377. Like most other counties, the two more common crimes are larceny - theft (2,983 incidents recorded in Clarke in 2022), and aggravated assault (1,979 incidents).

Muscogee and Fulton round out the top five of Georgia’s crime capitals, with rates of 32.9 and 30.5 crimes per 1,000 residents respectively. As the state’s most populous county, home to 1,065,313 people, Fulton had the highest total number of larceny - theft offenses, with 19,509 recorded in 2022. 

At the other end of the scale, out of the counties within an MSA in Georgia, the one with the lowest crime rate is Talbot. It is home to just 5,773 people, but there were just two crimes recorded there in 2022 - one aggravated assault, and one case of larceny - theft. The resulting rate is 034 crimes per 1,000 people.

Echols has Georgia’s second lowest crime rate of 0.8 crimes per 1,000 people, while Columbia has the third lowest rate - 3.81 for every 1,000 residents. 

Commenting on the study, a spokesperson for Bader Scott said: “These figures offer a fascinating insight into crime rates across major urban areas across the state. The rate varies considerably from county to county, but the common theme is that larceny - theft is the most frequently committed offense, and there were more than 100,000 incidents of it across Georgia’s MSAs in 2022.”