Largest incorporated places in the latest completed Census vintage.
Twenty cities. One research standard.Vintage 2025 · estimates for July 1, 2025
National city desk18 INTERACTIVE · 2 CITYWIDE
POPULATION-RANKED CITY CATALOG
Twenty cities.
No shortcuts.
The catalog now has a permanent place for every top-20 city. A city becomes comparable only after its official source, record unit, time period, revisions, and geography have been documented.
CITY-PROPER RANKING · NOT METRO POPULATIONCity pages with verified public-data mechanics already available.
Verified report-based pages where a defensible local map is not yet supported.
Structured facts in D1; immutable source files and manifests in R2.
U.S. CENSUS BUREAU / VINTAGE 2025
The population ledger.
Population is a catalog denominator, not a crime measure. Rates remain unavailable until the numerator, time period, geography, and denominator refer to compatible populations.
#01INTERACTIVE
New York City
New York
8,584,629Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- Complaint records, with separate shooting incident and victim files
- Research file
- Interactive neighborhood explorer, shooting detail, demographics, and comparison profile are live.
#02INTERACTIVE
Los Angeles
California
3,869,089Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- NIBRS offense rows
- Research file
- Interactive geographic explorer and source-aware comparison profile are live.
#03INTERACTIVE
Chicago
Illinois
2,731,585Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- Reported incident rows; murder records are victim-based
- Research file
- Community Area explorer, demographic profile, and comparison profile are live.
#04INTERACTIVE
Houston
Texas
2,397,315Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- Recent NIBRS Group A person, property, and society records
- Research file
- Police-beat explorer and rolling-window comparison profile are live.
#05CITYWIDE SOURCE
Phoenix
Arizona
1,665,481Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- Monthly NIBRS reports following a records-system transition
- Research file
- Transition-aware 2026 NIBRS source view is live; the new RMS period remains separate from the retired summary-reporting series.
#06INTERACTIVE
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
1,574,281Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- PPD crime-incident rows using local UCR general codes
- Research file
- Police-district explorer and comparison profile are live.
#07CITYWIDE SOURCE
San Antonio
Texas
1,548,422Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- Citywide NIBRS category totals and monthly comparison reports
- Research file
- Verified January–June 2026 person, property, and society totals are live; no compatible row-level geography is currently published.
#08INTERACTIVE
San Diego
California
1,406,106Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- NIBRS offense rows with separate police geography files
- Research file
- Interactive SDPD neighborhood explorer and source-aware current-year category view are live.
#09INTERACTIVE
Dallas
Texas
1,329,491Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- Public NIBRS Group A incident-offense rows
- Research file
- Police-sector explorer, demographic profile, and comparison profile are live.
#10INTERACTIVE
Fort Worth
Texas
1,028,117Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- Crime-map records and quarterly official reports
- Research file
- Interactive police-beat explorer using the official offense-record and boundary services is live.
#11INTERACTIVE
Jacksonville
Florida
1,017,689Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- Filtered public crime mapping and transparency records
- Research file
- Interactive JSO patrol-district explorer using the official offense table and NIBRS crime-against categories is live.
#12INTERACTIVE
Austin
Texas
1,002,632Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- APD report rows containing the highest-level offense
- Research file
- Council-district explorer, demographic profile, and comparison profile are live.
#13INTERACTIVE
San José
California
989,814Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- SJPD district-level published measures
- Research file
- District explorer and source-aware comparison profile are live.
#14INTERACTIVE
Charlotte
North Carolina
964,784Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- Public policing datasets governed by North Carolina disclosure rules
- Research file
- Interactive CMPD patrol-division explorer using the official highest-NIBRS incident file is live.
#15INTERACTIVE
Columbus
Ohio
938,396Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- Public offense reports and third-party community crime map records
- Research file
- Interactive police-precinct explorer using the official nightly incident-report file is live.
#16INTERACTIVE
Indianapolis
Indiana
901,116Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- Public incident, NIBRS, calls-for-service, and related ArcGIS layers
- Research file
- Interactive IMPD district explorer is live; separate local jurisdictions remain visibly excluded from the district map.
#17INTERACTIVE
San Francisco
California
826,079Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- Incident report rows
- Research file
- District explorer and source-aware comparison profile are live.
#18INTERACTIVE
Seattle
Washington
784,777Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- Finalized NIBRS Group A offense reports
- Research file
- MCPP neighborhood explorer and comparison profile are live.
#19INTERACTIVE
Denver
Colorado
740,613Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- Dynamic NIBRS offense rows for the prior five years and current YTD
- Research file
- Interactive statistical-neighborhood explorer using Denver’s weekday-updated offense file is live.
#20INTERACTIVE
Nashville
Tennessee
721,074Estimated residents · July 1, 2025- Published unit
- Incident-offense records
- Research file
- Police-precinct explorer and source-aware comparison profile are live.
Ranking source: U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2025 city ranking ↗. Indianapolis and Nashville use the Census Bureau’s published balance geographies.
THE ENTRY GATE
What has to be true before a number appears.
A source URL is only the beginning. Every adapter must preserve what the local agency actually counts and disclose what it leaves out.
Identify
Record the publishing agency, canonical URL, license, update cadence, and current source status.
Define
Document whether each row is an incident, offense, complaint, victim, arrest, or call for service.
Geocode
Use the city’s official neighborhood, district, beat, or precinct geography without silently substituting another boundary.
Snapshot
Capture the raw source, retrieval time, row count, schema version, and SHA-256 checksum before transformation.
Normalize
Map only defensible common categories. Keep source-native terms and incompatible values available for inspection.
Compare
Open a comparison lens only when the unit, period, geography, and denominator are compatible enough to explain clearly.
HISTORICAL LEDGER / STORAGE FOUNDATION
Keep every edition of the truth.
Police data changes as records are corrected and reclassified. The ledger is designed to preserve both the current answer and the source edition that produced it.
D1 relational ledger
Stores cities, sources, source audits, ingestion runs, immutable snapshot metadata, and normalized observations. This is the searchable index used by the public site.
- Source and schema versions
- Period and geography definitions
- Row counts and checksums
- Comparable metric observations
R2 object archive
Stores the exact JSON, CSV, XLSX, PDF, or GeoJSON response used for each snapshot, plus normalized extracts and a small manifest.
- Immutable date-based object keys
- SHA-256 content identity
- Compressed normalized files
- Recoverable source evidence
Revision history
Each published value can point back to one snapshot. When a source changes, the ledger adds a new edition instead of overwriting the old one.
- Captured-at timestamp
- Data-through date
- Change from prior snapshot
- Archived source manifest
Official city source→Immutable R2 capture→D1 snapshot index→City and comparison views
SCOPE NOTE
Largest city does not mean largest metro.
This catalog follows incorporated-place population because city police datasets usually follow municipal or consolidated-government jurisdictions. Metro rankings describe a different geography and would not line up with these local reporting systems.
Why some familiar cities are outside this list
Albuquerque, Anchorage, Atlanta, Augusta, Birmingham, Boston, Buffalo, Cleveland, Griffin, Honolulu, Lexington, Macon, Memphis, Miami, Milwaukee, Myrtle Beach, Oklahoma City, Orlando, Portland, San Juan, and St. Louis remain available in the city menu because the project already has useful official-data coverage for them. They are additional research cities, not members of this specific top-20 population cohort.