Bristol is policed by Avon and Somerset Constabulary, which also covers Bath, Weston-super-Mare and a wide swathe of the surrounding countryside under one force-wide figure. Same treatment as the other cities we have covered: what the official numbers show once you look past the single headline rate.
What the wider picture looks like
Independent analysis of police-recorded data by CrimeRate puts Avon and Somerset’s overall rate at 78 crimes per 1,000 people for the 12 months to April 2026, around 8% above the England and Wales average of roughly 72 per 1,000. The same analysis names Bristol as the force area’s highest-crime location and Bath as its safest — two cities under one police force, with very different profiles.
Why a force-wide number hides more than it shows
Even inside Bristol alone, the pattern repeats. The Harbourside and city-centre area, the Stokes Croft nightlife and independent-culture strip a short walk north, and the residential suburb of Westbury-on-Trym a few miles out all sit under the same city, the same force, and the same headline rate — and, as the numbers below show, do not look alike at all.
Compare Bristol areas yourself
A single figure cannot tell you about the specific street you actually care about. A couple of comparisons worth trying, each opens live with both postcodes already loaded:
- Bristol centre vs Westbury-on-Trym — the Harbourside and city-centre area against a quiet residential suburb.
- Stokes Croft vs Westbury-on-Trym — Bristol’s independent nightlife quarter against the same suburb.
A live snapshot from the police API (July 2026)
Here is what the categories actually looked like in a small area around each postcode last month, pulled live from data.police.uk — the same feed the address checker uses — and checked by hand against the raw record count. The centre and Stokes Croft boxes are roughly 300 metres across, small enough to stay well under the police API’s 500-record-per-request cap, which silently truncates anything busier than that. Westbury-on-Trym’s sample came back with a single incident in the same size box and window — genuinely quiet, not a truncation artefact.
Harbourside / centre
Stokes Croft
Westbury-on-Trym
Read these as a mix, not a scoreboard: the sample sizes are deliberately different, so the percentages show category share, not which area had more crime overall. Both the centre and Stokes Croft skew heavily towards violent crime, consistent with dense nightlife footfall in both, though Stokes Croft’s larger sample also shows a meaningfully bigger share of burglary and anti-social behaviour. Westbury-on-Trym’s single incident is too small a sample to draw any pattern from — which is itself the point: for a genuine twelve-month picture of one specific address, use the checker rather than a single month’s snapshot.
The limits of this data
This is recorded crime — what was reported and logged, not everything that happened. A rate, high or low, is not a verdict on a place or the people who live there; it is one data point among several worth weighing. If you want the fuller picture of how UK police data works and what it cannot tell you, we have written that up separately.
And as always: none of this replaces calling 999 in an emergency. This is context for everyday decisions, not a substitute for the emergency services.