Is Camas, Washington Safe? Safest Neighborhoods & Other Stats (2026)

Violent and Property Crime Rates: The Raw Numbers in Context

One-Seventh the State Rate

Camas's violent crime rate of 0.5 per 1,000 residents is roughly one-seventh the Washington state rate of 3.3 per 1,000 and roughly one-seventh the national rate of 3.6 per 1,000, based on FBI UCR 2024 data. In practical terms, that means assault, robbery, and similar offenses are genuinely rare in a city of about 27,000 people — not statistically suppressed by small-sample noise, but durably low across multiple reporting years.

Property crime tells a similar story. Camas's rate of 7 per 1,000 sits well below the national rate of 17.6 per 1,000 — and dramatically below Washington state's 24.7 per 1,000, a figure that ranked the state third worst nationally. The gap between Camas and the broader state context is the most important number on this page: you are not just moving to a safe suburb, you are moving to a community that bucks a pronounced statewide trend.

Why the State Comparison Matters

Washington's property crime struggles are concentrated in Seattle, Tacoma, Spokane, and along major transit corridors — not distributed evenly across every community. Camas benefits from its geography (a relatively contained city grid, SR-14 as a natural boundary to the south, and newer residential development to the east and north) and from a household income profile that doesn't produce the economic stress that drives opportunistic theft in higher-density areas.

It's also worth noting the national backdrop: 2024 saw the lowest violent crime rate in the U.S. since 1969 and the lowest property crime rate since 1961. Camas's numbers look strong in any macro environment; they look especially strong in what the FBI called a historically favorable year.

Neighborhood Safety: Where Camas Feels Different Block by Block

Camas is not a perfectly uniform safety picture. The general pattern — confirmed by CrimeGrade.org's 2025 analysis — is that the eastern and hillside portions of the city trend safer than areas closer to the commercial corridors and main arterials. Understanding this gradient before you choose a specific neighborhood matters more than the city-wide headline rate.

The Eastern Tier: Prune Hill, Lacamas Shores, Fisher's Landing East

Prune Hill, Lacamas Shores, and Fisher's Landing East are consistently cited as among the safest areas in Camas. These are predominantly owner-occupied, single-family neighborhoods with strong community cohesion — the kind of streets where neighbors recognize each other's cars. Lacamas Shores sits adjacent to Lacamas Lake and Lacamas Park, giving it a semi-enclosed feel that limits through-traffic. For a fuller breakdown of what distinguishes these neighborhoods from one another, see the best neighborhoods in Camas guide.

Downtown and the Historic District

Downtown Camas, centered on NE 4th Avenue and the Historic District, has the small-city texture you'd expect: a walkable main street, locally owned businesses, and Grains of Wrath brewery and gastropub on NE 5th Ave drawing evening foot traffic. Property crime risk is modestly higher in any commercial core than in purely residential areas — that's true in virtually every city — but Downtown Camas operates at a scale where that risk remains manageable. The concern isn't serious crime; it's the ordinary nuisances of any active commercial street.

Green Mountain and Lookout Ridge

Green Mountain and Lookout Ridge are newer, hillside developments where the housing stock skews larger and the street network is more curvlinear and residential. These areas have the natural advantage of low through-traffic — you don't pass through Green Mountain on the way to somewhere else. That insularity is a genuine safety asset.

Dallas Park and Grass Valley

Dallas Park and Grass Valley sit closer to the city's central and transitional zones. Neither is a concern by any objective measure — the city-wide crime floor is low enough that no named Camas neighborhood registers as high-risk. These areas simply don't carry the same residential insulation as the hillside and lakeshore neighborhoods farther east.

How the Camas Police Department Actually Performs

13,000 Calls, One Honest Gap

In 2024, the Camas Police Department handled approximately 13,000 calls for service across a city of about 27,000 people. Chief Tina Jones presented the department's annual statistics to the City Council in April 2025, and what stood out wasn't just the low crime rate — it was where the department's response-time performance varied by geography.

Priority-1 calls near downtown, Lacamas Lake, and the high school area averaged 5 minutes 25 seconds — inside the department's stated sub-6-minute goal. The western and northern neighborhoods averaged about 6 minutes 57 seconds for the same priority tier, falling short of that benchmark. The department has publicly acknowledged that gap, which is a reasonable thing to factor into your thinking if those areas are where you're looking.

Community-First Policing Model

The Camas PD operates neighborhood watch programs, crime-prevention education, and youth engagement initiatives — a structure that tends to perform better in low-crime environments because it keeps residents actively connected to their immediate area. It's a different dynamic than a reactive, high-volume policing model. In a city where the baseline is already this low, community engagement programs are less about crisis response and more about keeping the floor where it is.

One concrete data point: as of October 2025, there were 11 registered sex offenders residing in Camas — a ratio of 1 per 2,014 residents, lower than the Washington state average. That's a figure worth checking on a state sex offender registry directly if you have children and are evaluating a specific street, but the city-wide ratio provides useful baseline context.

What the Response-Time Gap Means Practically

A 6-minute-57-second average for priority-1 calls in the western and northern neighborhoods is not alarming in a city with crime rates this low — the probability of actually needing a priority-1 response is already very small. But if you're weighing two properties and one is significantly farther from the station, that gap is a legitimate, data-backed factor in your thinking. The department's transparency about it is, if anything, a mark in its favor.

Five-Year Trend: Is Camas Getting Safer or Sliding?

Single-year crime figures can mislead in small cities — one unusual incident shifts the rate visibly. That's why the five-year picture matters more than any headline number.

FBI Crime Data Explorer data compiled by CrimeExplorer shows that from 2019 through 2024, Camas averaged a violent crime rate of 21.6 per 100,000 residents — 79.7% below the national average over the same period. Its five-year average property crime rate was 53.9 per 100,000, running 67.1% below the national average. These aren't single-year anomalies. The low-crime profile has held consistently across half a decade that included a pandemic, significant population growth, and a period when crime trended upward nationally before reversing.

The Population Growth Factor

Camas has added residents steadily as Portland-area spillover buyers discovered Clark County. Growth that rapid in other cities sometimes coincides with rising property crime as the retail and commercial base expands and opportunistic theft follows. That pattern hasn't materialized here at a scale that registers in the data — which suggests the growth has been absorbed in a way that hasn't destabilized the safety profile.

The Statewide Pressure That Hasn't Arrived

Washington's property crime problem is real and documented — third worst in the nation by 2024 figures. Camas has remained insulated from that trend in a way that neighboring Vancouver, which shares the Portland metro orbit, has not matched to the same degree. Part of that is structural: Camas is less connected to the regional transit corridors and encampment clusters that drive opportunistic property crime in the broader metro. That insulation isn't guaranteed indefinitely, but the five-year data doesn't show any convergence toward the statewide trend.

What to Actually Research Before Choosing a Neighborhood

The Things the City-Wide Rate Won't Tell You

A city-wide violent crime rate of 0.5 per 1,000 is genuinely reassuring — but it averages across every neighborhood, every street, and every time of day. If you're choosing between two specific addresses in Camas, the aggregate rate is less useful than the block-level picture.

The Washington State Sex Offender Registry allows address-specific radius searches. Given the city-wide ratio of 1 registered offender per 2,014 residents, most blocks will return nothing — but parents with young children consistently say this is the one search they wish they'd run before settling on a specific property rather than after.

Verify the Neighborhood Watch Status

Active neighborhood watch programs in Camas operate through the Camas Police Department's community programs office. Not every block in the city has an active group — but the eastern neighborhoods, particularly in the Prune Hill and Lacamas Shores areas, tend to have the highest engagement. Before deciding on a neighborhood, it's worth calling the department directly to ask whether a watch group is active on or near a specific street. In a city with this crime profile, an active watch is more about community connection than it is about deterring serious crime — but that connection has real value.

One Friction Point Newcomers Don't Expect

After about six months, many residents who moved to the western or northern edges of Camas — attracted by newer construction and slightly different price points — mention the response-time reality as something they wish they'd thought about more carefully. Not because anything has happened to them, but because the 6-minute-57-second average for priority-1 calls in those zones is a concrete, publicly documented gap in service coverage. It doesn't make those areas unsafe; it's a data point that deserves weight alongside everything else.

Check Crime Mapping Tools — With One Caveat

CrimeGrade.org, SpotCrime, and similar tools provide useful directional information, but their methodologies vary significantly. CrimeGrade in particular uses a projection model that extends beyond official city limits and weights incidents by severity — which produces overall crime estimates that look higher than FBI figures for the same area. Use these tools to understand relative patterns within Camas (which blocks see more car break-ins, for example) rather than to compare Camas's absolute rate against another city. For cross-city comparison, the FBI UCR figures used throughout this guide are the appropriate benchmark.

NeighborhoodScout's analysis of FBI 2024 data found Camas's crime rate lower than approximately 61% of Washington communities of all sizes — useful context, though it also reflects how heavily Washington's statewide average is weighted by its highest-crime cities.

Quick Takeaways & FAQs

✅ Camas's violent crime rate of 0.5 per 1,000 is roughly one-seventh the Washington state average — a sustained, five-year pattern, not a single good year.

⚠️ Response times in Camas's western and northern neighborhoods averaged 6 minutes 57 seconds for priority-1 calls in 2024, falling short of the department's own sub-6-minute goal — worth knowing if you're evaluating those areas.

📍 Prune Hill, Lacamas Shores, and Fisher's Landing East are consistently identified as the city's safest zones by CrimeGrade.org's neighborhood-level analysis.

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