People who move to Redmond from somewhere with a higher crime profile tend to feel immediately at ease here — and the data backs that feeling up. With a violent crime rate of 1.3 per 1,000 residents (FBI UCR, 2024 calendar year), Redmond sits well below both Washington state's average and the national figure. But there's a number that trips people up: the property crime rate of 27.8 per 1,000 looks alarming until you understand what's driving it and where it's concentrated. Getting those two figures into context is the whole point of this guide.
Redmond's identity as the global home base for Microsoft, along with a dense cluster of tech employers including Nintendo of America, SpaceX Redmond, and AT&T's campus, has produced one of the most affluent ZIP codes in the Pacific Northwest. That concentration of high-value cars, electronics, and package deliveries in a dense suburb creates conditions that elevate property crime across the entire Seattle metro — not just here. Understanding the regional pattern is essential before drawing conclusions about Redmond specifically.
The city's safety picture isn't uniform across its eight neighborhoods. The northeast quadrant — anchored by Redmond Ridge and Bear Creek — reads very differently from the commercial corridors near Downtown Redmond and Overlake. Knowing which areas carry the bulk of reported incidents, and what type of crime those incidents represent, gives you a far more useful picture than any single city-wide number. For a broader look at how those neighborhoods differ in character and price, see the Redmond neighborhoods guide.
Whether you're choosing between Redmond and Kirkland, deciding which side of the city to prioritize, or simply trying to verify what you've heard about safety in the Seattle suburbs, the sections below break down Redmond's 2024 crime data, compare it against meaningful benchmarks, map the neighborhood-level variation, and explain what the Redmond Police Department is doing about the numbers that remain elevated.
Violent Crime in Redmond: What the 2024 FBI Data Shows
Redmond's violent crime rate of 1.3 per 1,000 residents is one of the lower figures you'll find in any city of 80,000-plus in Washington state. For context, Washington's statewide violent crime rate ran at 3.26 per 1,000 in 2024 — meaning residents here face roughly 60% less violent crime risk than the average Washingtonian. The gap against the national rate is similar: the U.S. average for 2024 came in at approximately 3.59 per 1,000, making Redmond's figure roughly 64% below that benchmark.
The most striking single data point: Redmond recorded zero homicides in the 2024 reporting year (FBI UCR data, released September 2025). For a city of more than 82,000 people inside a major metro area, that's genuinely unusual.
At a Glance: Violent Crime Comparison
| Geography | Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000) | Vs. Redmond |
|---|---|---|
| Redmond, WA | 1.3 | — |
| Washington State | 3.26 | Noticeably higher |
| United States | 3.59 | Substantially higher |
| Redmond homicides (2024) | 0 | — |
These are FBI UCR figures for 2024, released in September–October 2025. They represent the most current full-year data available.
Violent crime categories covered here — assault, robbery, rape, homicide — are where most people's safety instincts focus, and rightly so. On every one of those measures, Redmond compares well against both its state peers and the national average. The category that complicates the overall picture is property crime, which is addressed in the next section.
Property Crime: The Real Story Behind Redmond's Elevated Rate
Redmond's property crime rate of 27.8 per 1,000 residents sits noticeably above the national average of roughly 17.6 per 1,000. That gap is real and worth understanding — but the explanation matters as much as the number itself.
The Washington State Context
Washington's statewide property crime rate ran at 2,467 per 100,000 (24.67 per 1,000) in 2024 — approximately 40% above the U.S. average, per FBI data. Redmond's figure is elevated above even that already-high state baseline, but the underlying pattern is regional, not unique to this city. Every high-income, high-density suburb in the Seattle metro sees similar dynamics.
Analysts point to a specific driver: Redmond's concentration of tech-sector workers means an unusually high density of late-model vehicles, laptops, cameras, and package deliveries in relatively accessible suburban neighborhoods and parking structures. Catalytic converter theft, smash-and-grab vehicle break-ins, and porch package theft account for a large share of the incident volume. These are property offenses — frustrating and costly — but they're a different kind of risk than what most people mean when they ask "is this city safe?"
Property Crime Breakdown
| Category | Redmond Rate (per 1,000) | U.S. Average (per 1,000) | Primary Driver |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overall property crime | 27.8 | 17.6 | Larceny, vehicle-related |
| Washington state property crime | 24.67 | 17.6 | Regional pattern |
| Larceny / theft | Dominant subcategory | — | Package theft, smash-and-grab |
| Vehicle theft | Elevated in commercial zones | — | High-value tech-sector vehicles |
| Burglary | Smaller share of total | — | Concentrated near commercial corridors |
| Total crime rate trend | Down ~9% year-over-year | Down ~14% nationally | Improving trajectory |
Property crime subcategory breakdowns are directional estimates based on FBI UCR 2024 category reporting patterns for Redmond; larceny-theft consistently represents the largest share in cities with this profile.
One number that doesn't get enough attention: Redmond's total crime rate dropped approximately 9% year-over-year in 2024, consistent with Washington's statewide 14.1% decline over the same period. The direction of travel is meaningfully better than it was two years ago.
What This Means Practically
If you're parking a new truck in an unsecured lot near Redmond Town Center or leaving a laptop bag visible in your car near Overlake, you're accepting a real — if modest — risk. If you're asking whether your family faces physical danger walking around Redmond, the data says no, not at rates that should concern you relative to any other major metro suburb.
Neighborhood-Level Safety: Where Redmond Varies
The city-wide figure is a starting point. Where you actually land within Redmond shifts the risk profile substantially — particularly for violent crime, which isn't evenly distributed across the eight neighborhoods.
The Northeast Quadrant: Redmond's Safest Corner
Redmond Ridge and Bear Creek sit in the northeast, farther from the commercial density of the city center. CrimeGrade's analysis of Redmond's violent crime distribution shows victimization risk in the northeast running roughly twice as low as in the northwest areas. These neighborhoods are largely residential, with longer distances between parking structures, retail corridors, and transit hubs — the environments where most property incidents concentrate.
Bear Creek in particular, adjacent to the Bear Creek Trail network, has a quieter, more suburban feel that tends to attract families prioritizing low foot-traffic residential streets over walkable urban access.
Downtown Redmond and Overlake: Higher Incident Concentration
The central and commercial zones — Downtown Redmond's historic district and the Overlake neighborhood anchored by the Microsoft campus corridor — account for the highest concentration of reported incidents in the city. This is almost entirely a property crime story: retail theft, vehicle break-ins, and package theft track predictably with commercial density and parking infrastructure.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't live here. Plenty of residents do, and the compromise of walkable urban access versus slightly higher property crime exposure is one each household weighs differently. It does mean that parking habits, garage usage, and package security matter more in these zones than in Redmond Ridge.
Education Hill, Grass Lawn, Idylwood, and North Redmond
These neighborhoods occupy the middle of Redmond's safety distribution — quieter than the commercial core, with incident rates closer to the city median than either extreme. Education Hill's elevated residential streets and Idylwood's position along Lake Sammamish's edge give them an insulated feel. North Redmond's newer residential developments along Bear Creek Parkway trend toward the safer end of the city's range.
Neighborhood Safety Snapshot
| Neighborhood | Relative Violent Crime Risk | Relative Property Crime Risk | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Redmond Ridge | Among lowest in city | Low | Families Quiet |
| Bear Creek | Among lowest in city | Low–Moderate | Nature Privacy |
| Education Hill | Below city average | Moderate | Families Schools |
| North Redmond | Below city average | Moderate | First-Time Quiet |
| Grass Lawn | Near city average | Moderate | Families Commuter |
| Idylwood | Near city average | Moderate | Views Luxury |
| Overlake | Near city average | Moderate–High | Walkable Tech |
| Downtown Redmond | Above city average | Highest in city | Walkable Transit |
Risk designations are directional assessments based on FBI UCR 2024 data and CrimeGrade.org's geographic distribution analysis for Redmond — not precise per-neighborhood rates, which the city does not publish separately.
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What the Redmond Police Department Is Actually Doing
Redmond's Police Department isn't operating on a legacy model. In April 2024, RPD launched a Drone as First Responder (DFR) program that sends drones to 911 calls ahead of officers, providing real-time aerial assessment before anyone arrives on scene. RPD became the first law enforcement agency in Washington — and one of only a handful nationwide — to receive FAA approval to fly drones without a physical visual observer present. For a city worried about response times in a sprawling suburban geography, that's a meaningful operational advantage.
Community Programs Worth Knowing
Beyond the technology, RPD runs a full suite of community-facing programs: Neighborhood Watch, Business Watch, Community Police Academy, Youth Police Academy, Coffee with a Cop, National Night Out, and a Cadet program for young residents interested in law enforcement careers. These aren't checkbox programs — participation rates in Neighborhood Watch are high in the residential east side, and that community density is part of why the northeast quadrant consistently reads as lower-risk.
In 2024, RPD also launched the Take Me Home voluntary registry — a database that helps first responders quickly locate individuals with autism, Down syndrome, dementia, Alzheimer's, or other conditions that may cause wandering or disorientation. It's a small program with outsized value for families of individuals who might be at risk in a crisis, and it's the kind of initiative that reflects a department paying attention to its specific community's needs.
The Live Crime Dashboard
One practical tool that sets Redmond apart from most cities its size: RPD publishes a Crime Statistics Dashboard updated nightly, drawing on National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) Group A offense data as reported to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs (WASPC). Checking it before deciding on a specific street — or any time you want neighborhood-level specificity rather than annual averages — gives you far more current detail than any third-party aggregator. The dashboard is available directly through the city's police department website and is genuinely more useful for current, local incident data.
Most people who move here and then check that dashboard regularly report a fairly quiet feed in the residential neighborhoods — and a notably busier one around the Overlake parking structures and the Downtown commercial corridor, which confirms what the annual data shows.
Honest Friction: What People Don't Expect About Safety in Redmond
The Package Theft Reality
Six months in, many new Redmond residents discover that porch piracy is a genuine, recurring nuisance — not the dramatic safety concern they worried about, but an actual cost. The density of deliveries in a tech-worker suburb, combined with the ease of driving through well-maintained residential streets in a non-suspicious vehicle, creates near-daily opportunity. Smart mailboxes, garage delivery instructions, and neighbors who text each other are the practical responses locals have landed on. It's a quality-of-life irritant, not a safety threat, but it's real enough that you should factor it into your security setup before you move in, not after your first laptop charger disappears from the front step.
The Overlake Parking Structure Problem
If you're considering the Overlake neighborhood primarily for its proximity to Microsoft's campus and the light rail connection, know that the parking structures near the Overlake Transit Center and adjacent retail corridors see a disproportionate share of the city's vehicle break-ins. People who work in tech and leave laptops or work bags in their cars — even briefly — find this out the hard way. The solution isn't to avoid the neighborhood; it's to treat your car as a zero-storage zone and use the garage if your building has one. Locals who figure this out in month one tend to have no further problems.
Where Families Actually Feel Safe
The strongest signal of genuine community safety in Redmond isn't a crime statistic — it's the routine evening activity along the Sammamish River Trail corridor near Marymoor Park. Parents with strollers, solo runners after dark, kids on bikes without supervision: this is where you see how residents actually feel about their city after dark. The northeast residential neighborhoods produce the same quiet confidence. The shift in atmosphere between a Friday evening near the Redmond Town Center commercial zone and a Sunday morning on a Bear Creek residential street is noticeable — both are fine, but they feel different, and that difference is worth experiencing firsthand before you decide which part of the city suits you.
The Trend Line Points the Right Direction
Redmond's total crime rate dropped approximately 9% year-over-year in 2024, roughly in line with Washington's statewide improvement of 14.1% over the same period. The property crime numbers that remain elevated are real but declining. For a city that was never dangerous on the violent crime axis, the current trajectory is one more reason to feel reasonably confident about the long-term safety picture here.
Local Expert Takeaway: Redmond's violent crime rate of 1.3 per 1,000 is genuinely low — well below Washington state's 3.26 average and roughly 64% below the national figure — and the city recorded zero homicides in 2024. The property crime rate of 27.8 per 1,000 is the number that will give you pause, but it's largely a vehicle break-in and package theft story concentrated near Overlake's parking structures and the Downtown commercial corridor. If you're choosing between the northeast neighborhoods — Redmond Ridge, Bear Creek, North Redmond — and the commercial core, the northeast reads measurably quieter on every metric. Check the Redmond Police Department's nightly-updated Crime Statistics Dashboard on the city's police website before settling on a specific street, and set up package security before your first delivery, not after. The trend line is improving: 2024 saw about a 9% year-over-year drop in total crime. The safety fundamentals here are solid.
Quick Takeaways & FAQs
✅ Redmond's violent crime rate of 1.3 per 1,000 is roughly 60% below the Washington state average and 64% below the national rate — the city recorded zero homicides in 2024.
⚠️ Property crime at 27.8 per 1,000 is elevated above the U.S. average, driven largely by vehicle break-ins and package theft concentrated near Overlake and Downtown Redmond's commercial corridors — a pattern that reflects a statewide Washington trend more than a city-specific problem.
📍 RPD publishes a nightly-updated Crime Statistics Dashboard on the city's police department website that lets you check incident-level data for specific streets before you decide on a neighborhood — far more current and granular than any third-party crime aggregator.
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