Sydney crime statistics by suburb, what the data actually says

Where these numbers come from

The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) publishes recorded criminal incidents at suburb level, updated quarterly with a lag of about three months. This report is rebuilt from each release, and the period covered is always shown with the data. The current dataset covers July 2025 to June 2026 (stub period), and this page was last refreshed on 2026-07-11.

Read this before comparing suburbs

Three things stop raw crime numbers from meaning what they seem to mean.

Recorded is not the same as occurred. BOCSAR counts incidents reported to and recorded by police. Reporting rates differ by offence type, so recorded data understates some categories more than others.

Raw counts punish busy places. The Sydney CBD's daytime population is many times its resident population, and the same is true of Parramatta and other centres. A suburb that hosts enormous daily foot traffic will record high raw counts without being unusually risky for any one person or premises in it. Comparing a CBD count to a quiet residential suburb's count tells you about foot traffic, not danger.

Totals hide the mix. For a business deciding on security, the offence mix matters more than the total. Break and enter to a non-dwelling, stealing offences and malicious damage speak to premises risk. Offences concentrated in a licensed entertainment precinct at 2am say little about a warehouse two suburbs away.

The data

What the pattern means for a security decision

The recurring shape in Sydney's data is unglamorous: property offences against premises cluster after hours and around concentrations of value, industrial precincts, construction sites, retail strips in trading peaks. That maps to security choices directly. After-hours intrusion risk across a perimeter points to mobile patrols with alarm response. Theft during trading hours points to guarding or loss prevention at the peaks. A site holding high value in one place points to a static guard for the exposed window. Suburb level data is a useful input to that decision, and a poor substitute for a provider walking your actual site.

Method

We take BOCSAR's suburb-level recorded incident dataset each quarterly release, extract our 40 tracked Sydney suburbs, and compute totals, the premises-relevant category view and year-on-year change. We do not model, estimate, adjust or forecast. Where BOCSAR suppresses or does not publish a figure, we show nothing rather than an estimate.