Reported crime in Alaska rose 7.2% in 2025, driven by Anchorage increases

Reported crime in Alaska rose 7.2 percent in 2025 from the year before, and the Alaska Department of Public Safety attributes the increase to violent and property crime in Anchorage.

The department released the 2025 Crime in Alaska report Wednesday. Reported offenses for the Anchorage Police Department rose 14.6 percent, driven largely by property crime, while offenses reported by the Alaska State Troopers fell 5.9 percent. Statewide, every Part I crime category except murder and rape saw more offenses reported in 2025 than in 2024. Rape offenses are counted by victim and by each separation of time and place, so assaults spanning years can produce numerous counts for a single victim, complicating any simple reading of that category. Total crime remains 36.9 percent below 2018 levels.

Governor Mike Dunleavy tied the split to local policy. "While most of the state is much safer today than it was a few years ago, this data demonstrates that Anchorage policy makers must continue to make public safety a higher priority," Dunleavy said.

Commissioner James Cockrell warned against complacency. He said the 2025 data showed positive momentum, especially for the troopers, but "we must not become complacent as a state."

The numbers land inside a decade of contested crime policy. The Alaska State Legislature passed Senate Bill 91 in 2016 to slow corrections growth, then Senate Bill 54 in 2017, House Bill 312 in 2018 and House Bill 49 in 2019. The Urban Institute's Justice Reinvestment Initiative review found those later bills "rolled back nearly all JRI reforms." Dunleavy's office says the reported crime rate has fallen more than 40 percent since 2018, from 4,215.2 offenses per 100,000 residents to 2,451.5 in 2024, including a 7.0 percent drop from 2023 to 2024. Alaska's violent crime rate in 2024 was 722 per 100,000 residents, more than double the national rate of 359.

Thirty-two agencies reported data, covering 99.6 percent of the state's population. The Anchorage Police Department was the only one that did not submit data in the FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System format.

The department cautions that offenses are counted in the year reported, not the year they occurred, and that FBI Uniform Crime Reporting definitions do not always match Alaska's statutory definitions. Federal publications, it says, cannot be compared directly with reports built on state definitions. The Alaska Criminal Justice Data Analysis Commission goes further, noting that as many as half of violent crime victims and 60 percent or more of property crime victims never contact law enforcement. For Anchorage advocacy groups such as Victims for Justice, which provides grief support and crisis intervention to homicide and assault survivors, the harm outlasts any year's count.