This internet thing, it’s really catching on, isn’t it? There’s lots of stuff available online now, it’s come along in leaps and bounds in the last 6 or 7 years. That might seem a strange thing to say right now, but I do have a reason.
Quite some time ago I wanted to write a thorough article about crime statistics in Australia.
But after searching online the information I wanted, which was most specifically how to tell a safe suburb from a not so safe suburb, just did not seem to be available. Then, a while back, on my page about Perth, Pete mentioned a Perth Crime Map in one of the comments.
“Perth now has a crime map?” I thought to myself. “I wonder who else has got one then?” Today I jumped onto the web to find the answer to that question. Here’s what I found.
Sydney, New South Wales
For New South Wales I found what is called the ‘NSW Crime Tool’, but it takes some digging to find the information you need. What I liked about this site though is that you could click on the ‘Table’ tab on the top right hand side, and then click on the ‘Rate’ tab on the right-hand side of the pop-up to place the various suburbs in highest to lowest or lowest to highest order for the crime count.
That made it easy to pick out safe and not so safe suburbs.
What I wasn’t so keen on was the absence of an ‘All Crimes’ selection, you could only view the stats for different categories of crime. All the same, it’s a great website to find information about crime in Sydney and New South Wales. Here’s the link:
Melbourne, Victoria
Again, you will need to dig around in order to compare suburbs, but the ‘Crime by location’ tab gives a pretty good overview. Hover over any particular area and you will be given the crime count and the rate per 100,000, most of the maps mentioned here do talk in rates per 100,000.
For individual and very specific information about each suburb, they have a ‘Suburb Data’ tab. Here’s the link:
Brisbane, Queensland
I found a couple of maps for Brisbane and the whole of Queensland, the first is run by QLD Police Service.
This one was quite tricky to navigate, it was difficult to get the information I wanted at a glance. I found the best way to get this information was to go to the search box towards the top right hand side and enter ‘Brisbane’. As I was doing that, a selection called ‘Brisbane QPS Region’ popped up. Clicking on that selection changed the interactive map, and then by zooming in slightly I got the following image…
I found a second crime map covering the Brisbane area which is so controversial it may well get taken down at some point. It’s worth a visit even if just to see the pop-up warning it gives you and what you have to agree to before entering the site.
Again, this is a map you need to zoom into to get the information and it is just as clunky to use as the other Queensland map. But why is it controversial?
This map lists recorded offences by individual addresses including what the crime was and whether or not it was solved. I found an address, for example, that had 11 offences recorded against it, eight of which were labelled as solved drug offences.
Talk about snooping on your neighbour!
Whether they are clunky or controversial, both of these maps will help you find the safer areas. Here are the links:
Perth, Western Australia
This is an excellent interactive map. On their website you can simply hover over an area and get the crime stats info pop-up. You could easily find information about individual suburbs and also there was an interesting ‘Best vs Worst’ tab. This one mostly talks about crimes per 100 residents and it also ranked each suburb and had block graphs detailing the types of crimes.
This is an excellent tool for researching the Perth area and finding the safer suburbs. Here’s the link:
Canberra, ACT
As you can see, the Canberra crime map is probably the most colourful of them all. I was actually scared to click on anything in case I spoilt it. It even has a method to directly compare suburbs against each other, which is great for anyone thinking of moving to Canberra and trying to decide between shortlisted suburbs.
As pretty as it was though, you couldn’t hover over an area and get immediate crime statistics pop-up. To use this tool, you would need to know the postcode or name of each suburb you wanted to check out and compare and then type it into the search box.
Luckily for you, if you don’t have a map to hand you can get the information from my sub-pages about Canberra. Just hover over the link to Australian Cities at the top of this page, then Canberra, and then click on one of the areas of Canberra to see a list of all the names of all the suburbs within it.
As well as selecting information about individual suburbs, you can also look at the types of crimes that have taken place there, like burglary, property damage, or even traffic infringement notices.
Again, it’s a great tool for checking suburb safety. Here’s the link:
The rest
I did find a crime map for Adelaide, South Australia, but it wasn’t very satisfactory. If you clicked on a suburb you wanted information about, all that happened was a pop-up box would invite you to download a report. That made it very difficult to quickly compare suburbs with each other.
Maybe it’s a work in progress.
I couldn’t find any crime maps at all for either Hobart, Tasmania or Darwin in Northern Territory. Both did have websites with crime statistics though, just no interactive maps as at the time of writing. Here are the links:
- South Australia Police Crime Statistics
- Tasmania Police Crime Statistics
- Northern Territory Police Crime Statistics
The internet may well have come a long way in the last 6 or 7 years, but it’s exciting to know that it can still go even further. There you are, everything you ever wanted to know about crime in Australia, but were afraid to ask in case you got arrested.
As these crime stats have shown, you won’t get arrested for asking that simple question, but you might get arrested for assault, homicide, robbery, sexual offences, theft, malicious damage to property, abduction & kidnapping, crimes against justice procedures, arson, betting and gaming offences, blackmail and extortion, disorderly conduct, drug offences, harassment, threatening behaviour and private nuisance, liquor offences, other offences against the person, pornography offences, prohibited and regulated weapons offences and/or prostitution offences.
I think that’s it.
