922 Reports in a City of 45,000: Mt. Juliet’s Crime Rate Just Hit a 25-Year Low
The interesting thing about Mt. Juliet's latest crime numbers is not the headline figure. It is the denominator.
The city's police department reported that Mt. Juliet's overall crime rate for 2025 came in at 40.30 offenses per 1,000 residents — the lowest in at least 25 years of available data. That is the number that gets repeated. The number that gives it meaning is 45,000, which is roughly how many people now live here.
Run the two curves together
In 2001, Mt. Juliet was a town of about 14,800 people. Today it is a city of roughly 45,000. The population has roughly tripled in a single generation, which in most American suburbs is the exact circumstance under which crime totals climb — more people, more households, more traffic, more retail, more of everything that generates a police report.
Mt. Juliet's totals went the other way. The 2025 rate sits 40.8 percent below where it was in 2001, 23.1 percent below 2010, and 46.5 percent below the 2006 peak of 75.31 offenses per 1,000 residents. A city can shrink its crime rate by shrinking. This one did it while roughly tripling in size, which is a considerably harder trick.
The raw counts
Rates can flatter a growing city, so the absolute numbers matter too — and they hold up. Mt. Juliet logged 694 property crimes and 228 crimes against persons in 2025, for a combined 922 offenses.
Set that against the recent past. Property crime ran to 964 reports in 2020, 960 in 2018 and 887 in 2017 — all in a smaller city. Crimes against persons peaked at 340 in 2006 and stood at 328 in 2019 and 318 in 2020, against 228 last year. These are not rate artifacts. Fewer things happened, in plain counts, in a city with many more people in it.
What the department credits
Police leadership attributes the trend to a deliberately proactive posture rather than a reactive one, leaning heavily on technology that flags wanted individuals and stolen vehicles to officers in real time as they move through the city.
One statistic supports that reading more than any other. In the first six months of 2026, Mt. Juliet officers took 342 wanted individuals into custody — and 88 percent of them were not Mt. Juliet residents. That figure describes a department whose enforcement activity is aimed substantially at people passing through a corridor city rather than at the people living in it, which is a meaningfully different picture of local policing than the raw arrest count alone would suggest.
Chief Tyler Chandler framed the result in terms of what the numbers stand for rather than the numbers themselves, making the point that behind a lower rate are actual residents who were never victimized in the first place. It is a fair way to read a spreadsheet.
Why this lands now
Mt. Juliet spends most of its news cycle on growth — new tenants, new rooftops, new lanes of traffic. The corner at Division Street keeps filling in with new tenants, and family destinations like the new blacklight mini-golf and arcade complex keep opening. The reasonable civic anxiety attached to all that growth is whether the things people moved here for survive it.
On this particular measure, over this particular quarter-century, the answer is that they did. That is worth stating plainly, because it is the kind of result that tends to go unremarked precisely when it is working.
One caveat worth keeping: a single year is a data point, not a guarantee, and 2026's full-year figures are not in yet. The 25-year trend is the story. The next year is still being written.
