MADISON — Reported crime in Madison fell by nearly a quarter last year, according to the city’s newest crime report, which shows fewer offenses across nearly every major category and no serious violent crimes.
The Madison Police Department released its 2025 crime numbers this month through the incident-based reporting system. The report counted 512 of the more serious offenses tracked by the FBI in 2025, down from 676 the year before, which is a drop of 164 crimes, or about 24 percent.
“I am glad to report there were no major violent crimes within the City of Madison in 2025,” Police Chief Gene Waldrop wrote in the department’s summary. There were no murders in Madison in either 2025 or 2024.
Adjusted for the city’s population of about 28,000, that works out to roughly 1,824 of these offenses for every 100,000 residents, down from about 2,409 the year before.
The report comes from NIBRS, the National Incident-Based Reporting System. In plain terms, it is the way police departments now tell the FBI what crimes happened in their town. Older reporting only counted the single most serious crime in any given incident, which meant a lot of what actually happened never showed up in the tally. The current system counts up to 10 offenses per incident, along with details like whether the victim knew the offender and whether an arrest was made.
That is why this kind of report matters to residents: it gives a fuller, more honest picture of what police are actually responding to, and it lets you compare one year to the next, or one city to a neighboring one, on the same terms.
The FBI sorts these offenses into three buckets that are easy to follow: crimes against people, like assault; crimes against property such as theft, fraud, or vandalism; and crimes against society such as drug and weapon violations.
Waldrop’s summary points to property and financial crimes like fraud, embezzlement, larceny and identity theft as the main source of the decrease, along with a drop in simple assaults, most of which involved people who knew each other.
The raw numbers show the decline was broader than that. The single biggest drop was in drug crimes: drug and narcotic violations fell from 152 in 2024 to 72 in 2025, less than half of the year before. Simple assaults dropped from 99 to 59, aggravated assaults from 13 to 4, and vandalism from 38 to 14.
Property crime as a whole did fall, but not as much, and a few types actually rose. Shoplifting climbed from 60 cases to 69, forgery and counterfeiting more than doubled from 11 to 24, and credit card and ATM fraud ticked up from 30 to 33. Identity theft, on the other hand, dropped from 31 cases to 18.
On the violent side, the totals stayed low but not empty. The department logged two rapes in 2025, up from one the year before, along with one statutory rape and one kidnapping, neither of which appeared in the 2024 count.
Two figures moved in the other direction. The share of cases police were able to close, known as the clearance rate, slipped from about 62 percent in 2024 to about 55 percent in 2025. And total arrests fell sharply, from 681 to 398.
Some of that tracks with the drop in crime itself, as fewer offenses generally means fewer arrests. But the lower clearance rate means a somewhat larger share of Madison’s cases went unsolved last year than the year before.
As a whole, the report describes a city that stayed quiet on the violent end and saw meaningful declines in drugs, assaults and property crime, even as a handful of theft and fraud categories crept up. Waldrop credited the numbers to a mix of citizen cooperation and visible police presence, and again urged residents to lock their homes and vehicles and keep valuables out of sight.
The department noted the figures are valid as of July 16, 2026 and can still change as cases are updated. Residents can review Madison’s numbers and compare them to other Mississippi jurisdictions through the state’s crime statistics portal at mscrimestats.dps.ms.gov.
