Australian Crime Heat Map

Frequently asked questions

Which suburbs have the highest crime rates in Australia?

The highest residential crime rates tend to be in inner-city and entertainment-district suburbs, where crime is recorded by incident location and includes offences involving the many visitors and workers passing through, not just residents. Use the heat map above and switch between crime types to see how the hotspots shift — a suburb that ranks high for non-domestic assault (street violence) often differs from those high for break & enter or car theft.

What is the safest city in Australia?

Safety varies far more between suburbs than between cities, so there is no single safest city. Each suburb on the map carries a residential safety score (0–100) benchmarked against its own state, because state police agencies count and categorise offences differently. Zoom into a capital and click suburbs to compare their scores directly.

How is suburb crime data collected?

Figures come from state crime agencies — in NSW, the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) — which publish recorded criminal incidents by suburb. We aggregate the latest available year, convert counts to a rate per 100,000 residents using ABS Census population, and compute the residential safety score from five household-relevant categories. See the methodology page for the full detail.

What types of crime are shown on the map?

You can view total residential crime, or filter to a single category: break & enter dwelling, steal from dwelling, motor vehicle theft, domestic assault, robbery, or non-domestic (street and public-place) assault. Switching crime type re-colours the map for that category, normalised so the spread of colours stays meaningful.