Comparisons of crime rates across countries often focus on homicides or murders. In 2025, the U.S. murder rate will be about 4 per 100,000 people—roughly twice Canada’s 2024 homicide rate of 1.91 per 100,000.
However, homicides represent only a tiny share of violent crime. In 2024, homicides accounted for just 0.21% of violent crimes in the United States, based on National Crime Victimization Survey estimates of rape/sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault. By comparison, Canada’s most recent General Social Survey (GSS) on Safety and Victimization, from 2019, shows that homicides accounted for only about 0.022% of a comparable measure of total violent crime.
Although homicides make up a very small share of violent crime in both countries, they account for a much larger share in the United States. Specifically, homicides represent 9.5 times the share of violent crime in the U.S. as they do in Canada. This difference reflects not only the higher U.S. homicide rate but also the dramatically lower overall violent crime rate reported in the United States.
Canada, like the United States, uses two measures of crime: crimes reported to the police and total crime. In the United States, the Bureau of Justice Statistics measures total crime through the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). In Canada, Statistics Canada measures total crime through the General Social Survey (GSS), which it typically conducts every five years. We have previously done a similar comparison with Australia.
Although the media and most public discussions focus on crimes reported to the police, victims report only a small share of violent crimes. This distinction becomes especially important when making international comparisons because reporting rates can vary dramatically across countries. For example, Statistics Canada found that victims reported only 29% of violent crimes to the police in 2019. In the same year, the comparable reporting rate in the United States was 41%. In 2024, 48.1% of violent crimes in the US were reported to the police. Everything else being equal, the higher reporting rate in the United States would make its violent crime rate appear 41% higher than Canada’s in 2019 (41%/29%=1.41), even if both countries experienced exactly the same level of violent crime.
There are reasons to believe that the gap between the GSS estimate of violent victimization and police-reported violent crime may be even much larger than this comparison suggests. As shown below, the Canadian police-reported violent-crime rate was 885 per 100,000 people equals only 10.7% of the GSS violent-victimization rate of 8,300 per 100,000. Because the GSS excludes victims under age 15 while police-reported crime includes victims of all ages, the age mismatch alone even biases this percentage upward. All else equal, restricting the comparison to the GSS population would reduce the police-reported share below 10.7%.
Compare this to the U.S. data. The FBI does not collect or publish national counts for simple assaults. However, in 2019 the FBI recorded 1,203,808 violent crimes, while the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimated 2,013,220 felonious violent crimes (rape/sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault, excluding simple assault). Thus, crimes reported to police amounted to 59.8% of the NCVS estimate.
Because victims report simple assaults to police less often than aggravated assaults, this 59.8% figure almost certainly overstates the overall reporting rate for violent crime. Whether one assumes that Americans report crimes to police 41% more often than Canadians, 5.6 times more often, or—more plausibly—somewhere between those extremes, the central point remains the same: police-reported crime rates do not provide a direct measure of underlying crime rates. Differences in police-reported crime rates can reflect differences in reporting behavior as much as, or more than, differences in actual criminal victimization.
As a result, comparisons either across countries or even over time within the same country based solely on police-reported crime can create a misleading picture of differences in violent crime rates across countries. Table 1 uses the data from the US DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2019 and 2024 as well as the data from the Canada’s GSS survey for 2019.
There are some problems making comparisons using these surveys because they define some crimes differently. The Canadian GSS measures sexual assault more broadly than the NCVS because it includes a wider range of unwanted sexual touching and sexual contact offenses. Conversely, the NCVS’s overall violent-crime measure is broader than the GSS’s assault measure because the NCVS includes threats of violence (simple assault without physical contact), while the GSS assault category generally requires physical contact.
Because assaults account for most violent crimes in both surveys, the NCVS’s inclusion of threatened and attempted assaults affects total violent-crime rates more than the GSS’s broader sexual-assault definition. Consequently, a direct comparison of the published NCVS and GSS violent-crime rates tends to make the United States appear relatively more violent—and Canada relatively less violent—than would be the case under harmonized definitions.
Still, even with this relative bias against the US, Canada’s total violent crime rate in 2019 was 295% higher than the rate in the US. Even removing rape/sexual assault to remove the bias agains the Canadian numbers but leaving assault so that there is still the bias against the US numbers, the Canadian violent crime rate is still 175% higher than the rate in the US. In addition, the robbery data is highly comparable between the two surveys and the robbery rate in Canada is 268% higher than in the US. Canadians are about 366 times more likely to be robbed than they are to be a homicide victim.
The burglary rate in Canada is also much higher than the rates in the US — 259%.. Only for the category of “other/household theft” is the rate 19% lower in Canada.
Nor does the U.S.–Canada gap reflect a recent development or different crime definitions. The International Crime Victimization Survey (ICVS) asked the same questions and used the same crime definitions across countries. In 2000, it found an overall violent-crime victimization rate of 7% in Canada, compared with 5% in the United States—a rate 40% higher in Canada (Table 2). As with the rest of the analysis presented here, higher rates of assaults/threats and robbery mainly drove the gap. Unfortunately, the ICVS was discontinued.
| Table 1: Comparing Total Violent and Property Crime Rates in the US and Canada | |||||
| Category | US (NCVS 2024) per 1,000 people except for burglary | US (NCVS 2019) per 1,000 people except for burglary | Canada (GSS 2019) per 1,000 people except for burglary | How much higher is Canada’s Crime rate relative to the US’s in 2019 | Notes on Comparability |
| Overall total violent crime | 23.3 (age 12+) | 21.0 (age 12+) | 83 (age 15+) | 295% | includes all assaults, not just aggravated assaults for compatibility. Questionable Rape/Sexual assault differences |
| Overall total violent crime, excluding rapes/sexual assaults because they are measured differently | 21.3 | 19.3 | 53 | 175% | |
| Rape/sexual assault | 2 | 1.7 | 30 | Not comparable enough | Canada includes broader unwanted touching/grabbing |
| Robbery | 2.2 | 1.9 | 7 | 268% | Highly comparable |
| All assaults | 19.1 | 17.4 (agg. 3.7 + simple 13.7) | 46 (physical assault) | 164% | Canada’s physical assault ≈ US is much broader as in includes threats in total assaults |
| Overall Property Crime Rate | 97.6 | 101.4 | 172 | 69% | Canada total includes vandalism; US excludes personal theft and vandalism (reported separately or not at all) |
| Burglary | 8.8 per 1,000 households (incl. attempted) | 11.7 per 1,000 households (incl. attempted) | 42 per 1,000 households (incl. attempted) | 259% | Highly comparable |
| Motor vehicle theft | 6.3 | 3.9 | 20, including parts | 412% | Highly comparable; Canada’s rate includes vehicle parts. |
| Other / household theft | 79.3 | 80.2 | 65 | -19% | Direct analogue; US “other theft” is residual category. |
| Trespassing | 3.8 | 5.5 | N/A | N/A | US-specific; trespassing has no theft intent. |
| US 2024 from BJS Criminal Victimization, 2024 (Table 2); US 2019 and trends from BJS Criminal Victimization, 2023report comparisons; Canada 2019 from Statistics Canada GSS Juristat (Table 1 / Chart 1). All rates are for the past 12 months. | |||||
According to the Canadian General Social Survey (GSS), only 6% of sexual assaults are reported to the police. By contrast, the U.S. National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) indicates that victims reported 34% of rapes and sexual assaults to police in 2019. As discussed above, even these figures overstate the true reporting rates. A more direct measure divides the number of crimes actually recorded by police by the GSS and NCVS estimates of the total number of crimes committed. Using that approach yields substantially lower reporting rates..Burglary is an exception for this pattern, since the rate that those crimes are reported to police is almost identical for both Canadians (45%) and Americans (44%). These results suggest that comparing reported violent crime rates between Canada and the United States is problematic because differences in reporting behavior—and in the extent to which crimes enter official police statistics—can vary substantially across offense types and between countries.
While not much weight should be placed on comparing the reported crime data because of the huge differences in the rates that crimes are reported in the two countries, it is still useful to see how much higher the USA looks in terms of reported violent crimes
| Table 2: Comparing Reported Violent and Property Crime Rates in the US and Canada | ||||
| Crime Category | United States (FBI) 2024 except for Homicides 2025 | Canada (StatsCan UCR) 2024 | How much higher is USA’s Crime rate relative to the Canada’s in 2019 | Comparability |
| All Violent Crime (first three categories and all assaults so that it is most comparable to the previous table) | 1190.6 | 801.2 | 49% | |
| Homicide | 4 | 1.9 | 111% | Very High. Definitions are nearly identical. Best cross-national comparison. |
| Robbery | 62.3 | 58.5 | 6% | High. Both require theft combined with violence/threats. Minor legal differences only. |
| Rape / Sexual Assault | 24.3 | 90.8 | -73% | Low. Canada includes a much broader range of sexual assaults; FBI rape definition is narrower. Rates are not directly comparable. |
| Aggravated Assault / Serious Assault | 267.7 | roughly 100–150 (Level 2 & 3 assaults only) | 114% | Moderate. Similar concept but Canada reports assault by levels and also includes many offenses elsewhere classified separately in U.S. data. |
| All assaults | 1,100 per 100,000* | roughly 600–700 per 100,000 | 69% | Moderate. That “all assaults” comparison is the most defensible way to compare assault prevalence across the two countries because it aligns the broad Canadian assault category, but the US number is still much broader as it includes threats of violence. |
| All Property Crime | 1,760 | ~2,842 | -38% | Moderate-Low. Broad categories contain somewhat different offense mixes and counting rules |
| Burglary / Break-and-Enter | 250 | ~314 | -20% | High. Very similar offenses involving unlawful entry. One of the better property-crime comparisons. |
| Motor Vehicle Theft | 318 | ~342 | -7% | Very High. Definitions are extremely similar. |
| Larceny/Theft | 1,190 | ~2,186 | -46% | Moderate-Low. Canada includes some offenses that the FBI reports separately; reporting practices also differ. |
One final comment about murders is that the US is relatively unique in terms of how extremely concentrated they are in the US.
0 Comments