Is Laredo, Texas Safe? Safest Neighborhoods & Other Stats (2026)

Laredo's Crime Rates in Context: What the Numbers Actually Say

State and national figures — Bureau of Justice Statistics, Crime Known to Law Enforcement, 2024 (tables 2 and 3). City figures — NeighborhoodScout, based on FBI crime data. City rates come from a different reporting series than the state and national benchmarks, so read the comparison as a direction, not a precise multiple.

The most important thing to understand about Laredo's crime data is which comparison you're making. Measured against smaller Texas towns — places under 50,000 people — Laredo's rates look elevated. Measured against cities of similar population, the picture reverses sharply.

Laredo carries a violent crime rate of 4 per 1,000 residents and a property crime rate of 15 per 1,000 residents (Crime Known to Law Enforcement, 2024). The state violent crime rate is also 4 per 1,000, meaning Laredo sits exactly at the Texas average for violent crime. Laredo's residents carry a property crime rate of 15 per 1,000 residents — running noticeably below the Texas state figure, a meaningful structural advantage for homeowners and renters alike.

Against national benchmarks, the picture is mixed but still favorable on property crime. The national violent crime rate is 3.7 per 1,000 — marginally below Laredo's 4 per 1,000. The national property crime rate of 18.4 per 1,000 is one that a property crime rate of 15 per 1,000 residents beats by a meaningful margin.

Homicide, the statistic that most shapes fear, is where Laredo performs most strongly. The Laredo Police Department recorded 6 homicides in all of 2024 — down from 8 the year before — producing a homicide rate roughly half the national average. For a city of 269,515, that is a remarkably low number.

What Drives the Violent Crime Total

Aggravated assault accounts for the largest share of Laredo's violent crime figures. The city reported 699 aggravated assaults in 2024. Through the first ten months of 2025, that count had already fallen to 519, down from 584 during the same stretch in 2024. The overall violent crime trend is moving in the right direction.

Resident perception tracks closely with the data. Residents consistently describe the city as manageable and safe in their daily experience, and the crime data backs that up — the numbers are not hiding a felt reality that contradicts them.

The Geographic Safety Gradient: Northeast vs. Southwest

Crime in Laredo is not evenly distributed. The city's safest and least safe areas sit in different quadrants, and where you choose to live within Laredo matters more than the city-wide rate alone.

The Northeast: Where the Data Points

The northeast section of Laredo is widely identified by residents and crime-data aggregators as the safest part of the city. The established subdivisions in this corridor — San Isidro, La Bota Ranch, Crown Ridge, and Del Mar Hills — sit in this northeastern tier, where violent-crime exposure is among the lowest the city produces. These are also the neighborhoods that run above the city-wide home price median, which is consistent with what you'd expect: safer quadrants carry a price premium.

The Southwest: A Different Picture

The southwest quadrant carries meaningfully higher violent-crime exposure — a real gap that the aggregate city rate does not capture. The older, closer-to-downtown corridors in this zone see a concentration of incidents that residents in the northeast simply don't experience.

The Northwest Retail Distortion

Here's a detail that misleads a lot of newcomers using online heat maps: northwest Laredo shows the highest raw incident counts, with roughly 1,224 crime incidents recorded annually. Much of that is driven by retail corridors and high-traffic commercial areas along Loop 20 and I-35 — places where the target-rich environment for theft inflates the per-resident rate without reflecting the experience of people who live in those neighborhoods. The east side records the fewest incidents of any quadrant, approximately 435 per year. A heat map that doesn't distinguish between commercial-corridor theft and residential crime will overstate the risk in northwest Laredo's residential areas.

For anyone researching specific neighborhoods before deciding where to focus their search, the neighborhoods guide covers character and context for each of the major residential areas.

Property Crime in Laredo: Theft-Dominant, Burglary Below National Norms

Property crime is the more common experience for residents of any American city, and Laredo's profile here is more favorable than its reputation suggests.

Larceny Is the Primary Category

Theft — larceny — is the dominant property crime category in Laredo, as it is in virtually every large U.S. city. The city's burglary rate, however, runs well below the national average: FBI 2024 data places Laredo's burglary rate at roughly 199 per 100,000 residents against a national figure around 500 per 100,000. Breaking into someone's home is, statistically, noticeably less common in Laredo than in most comparable American cities.

Vehicle Theft and Practical Precautions

Auto theft is the property crime category where Laredo residents consistently say vigilance pays off. The Laredo Police Department's "Watch Your Car" program — credited in the department's own reporting with contributing to improved overall outcomes — reflects that this is a known pressure point. Residents in the established northeast subdivisions tend to use driveways and garages, which provides some natural deterrence. In older areas with denser street parking, the calculus is different.

Overdose deaths, a public health metric that intersects with street-level safety, also improved markedly: the Laredo Police Department recorded 35 overdose deaths in 2024, down from 66 the year before. That kind of improvement doesn't happen accidentally — it reflects a sustained enforcement and intervention effort.

What This Means Practically

For most residents, day-to-day property crime exposure in Laredo looks like what you'd experience in any mid-sized Texas city: park in visible, well-lit areas; don't leave valuables in vehicles; know your neighborhood. A property crime rate of 15 per 1,000 residents puts Laredo well below the Texas state average — a meaningful structural advantage for homeowners and renters alike.

Policing, Federal Presence, and What Keeps Laredo's Rates Low

A city on an international land-port border could easily have elevated transnational crime exposure. The reason Laredo's numbers look the way they do is partly structural: the policing presence here is substantially heavier than you'd find in an inland city of comparable size.

Operation Stonegarden and Federal Resourcing

The Laredo Police Department operates with two federally funded grant programs that most cities its size do not have access to: Operation Stonegarden, a federal program targeting transnational crime along the southern border, and TEAOF, a Texas state equivalent. Webb County has received nearly $58 million from Operation Stonegarden since 2008. That is not a small number. The practical effect is additional patrol capacity and multi-agency coordination that puts more officers on Laredo streets than the city's own municipal budget would fund alone.

What the Border Presence Actually Means for Residents

The perception that living next to an international border means living with cartel-adjacent violence is one that Laredo residents push back on consistently — and the data backs them up. Federal law enforcement, U.S. Border Patrol, and the Laredo Police Department operate overlapping jurisdictions here in a way that functionally increases the deterrence effect. The World Trade International Bridge corridor moves an enormous volume of commercial traffic; that corridor is heavily monitored as a matter of trade security, not just criminal enforcement.

A Note on Trend Direction

Violent crime in Laredo through the first ten months of 2025 ran roughly 15% below the same period in 2024 — 695 total violent crime incidents versus 817 the year before. That kind of improvement in a city that was already competitive on safety is meaningful for anyone evaluating whether to move here. The trajectory matters as much as the snapshot.

One thing that surprised some residents after their first year here: the visible presence of federal law enforcement — marked vehicles, checkpoints along I-35 — is a daily reality that newcomers from inland Texas or other states aren't always prepared for. It reads as reassuring to some and jarring to others, but it is part of life in Laredo in a way that has no parallel in most American cities.

Neighborhood-Level Safety Picture: Where to Focus Your Research

City-wide rates tell you the average. What actually shapes your experience is which neighborhood you land in — and in Laredo, that decision carries more weight than in a city where crime is more evenly distributed.

The Safer Tier: Northeast and East Corridors

San Isidro, La Bota Ranch, Crown Ridge, Del Mar Hills, and Plantation make up the primary residential tier in the northeast quadrant. These neighborhoods sit in the lowest violent-crime exposure zone the city produces. They also run above the city-wide home price median — which means paying a premium for the safety profile is real, but the premium is measured against a base price that is already among the most affordable in Texas for a city of this size. For full neighborhood character breakdowns, see the neighborhoods guide.

The Mid-Tier: Hillside Terrace and Winfield

Hillside Terrace and Winfield sit in the established residential fabric of the city and both run above the city-wide median on price. Neither is in the northeast's lowest-risk quadrant, but both are solidly residential areas where the community texture — established streets, homeowner presence — provides its own informal safety signal. Residents here report safety experiences closer to the northeast than to the southwest.

Budget-Accessible Areas: Cuatro Vientos

Cuatro Vientos and Cuatro Vientos Norte price below the city-wide median, which makes them the entry point for buyers working with tighter budgets. The trade-off on safety exposure is real in these areas — they sit closer to the southwest quadrant's elevated risk zone. That does not make them uniformly dangerous, but it is the honest picture. Checking block-level data on a crime aggregator site before settling on a specific street in this corridor is worth the time.

The One Research Step Most Newcomers Skip

Raw heat maps available through various crime aggregator sites almost always overstate crime in Laredo's northwest corridor because they don't distinguish between commercial-zone incidents (retail theft along the major corridors) and residential crime. A newcomer who rules out the entire northwest quadrant based on a heat map may be eliminating areas where actual resident experience is materially better than the aggregate number suggests. Drill down to the specific street type — residential versus commercial — before drawing conclusions.

For how neighborhood character, parks access, and outdoor amenities layer onto this safety picture, the parks and recreation page covers Laredo's green space in detail.

Quick Takeaways & FAQs

✅ WalletHub's composite safety study has ranked Laredo the safest city in Texas for four consecutive years — a result the underlying crime data broadly supports.

⚠️ Crime in Laredo concentrates in specific quadrants: the gap between the northeast's violent-crime exposure and the southwest's is more than threefold, so neighborhood choice matters more than the city-wide rate.

📍 The northwest retail corridor inflates Laredo's raw crime counts on heat maps — commercial-zone theft along Loop 20 makes residential areas in that quadrant look riskier than residents actually experience them.

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