Cardiff is Wales’s capital and largest city, policed by South Wales Police. It is also the reason this series is not called “Crime in UK Cities” with an Edinburgh entry: Police Scotland does not publish street-level crime data through data.police.uk at all, so Scotland cannot be covered by the same verified method used for every other city here. South Wales Police does publish through it, so Cardiff gets the same treatment as London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol.
What the wider picture looks like
Independent analysis of police-recorded data by CrimeRate puts South Wales Police’s overall rate at 70 crimes per 1,000 people for the 12 months to April 2026 — close to, and if anything slightly below, the England and Wales average of roughly 72 per 1,000. Within the force area, the same analysis names Swansea as the highest-crime location and Cardiff as the second-highest, ahead of the force’s overall average.
Why a force-wide number hides more than it shows
South Wales Police covers Cardiff, Swansea, the Vale of Glamorgan and the South Wales valleys in one figure. Even within Cardiff alone, the pattern from every other city in this series repeats: the city centre around Cardiff Central and Cathays, the City Road nightlife and restaurant strip in Roath, and the leafy suburb of Llandaff a couple of miles out all sit under one force-wide rate — and, as the numbers below show, do not look alike at all.
Compare Cardiff 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:
- Cardiff city centre vs Llandaff — a dense retail and transport hub against a quiet cathedral-village suburb.
- City Road vs Llandaff — Cardiff’s nightlife and restaurant strip 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 city-centre box is roughly 200 metres across and City Road’s roughly 300 metres, both small enough to stay well under the police API’s 500-record-per-request cap, which silently truncates anything busier than that. Llandaff’s sample came back with a single incident in the same size box and window — genuinely quiet, not a truncation artefact.
City centre
City Road
Llandaff
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. The city centre splits fairly evenly between shoplifting and criminal damage, with violent crime close behind — a retail-and-evening-economy mix. City Road, a dedicated restaurant and nightlife strip, leans harder towards violent crime and, more distinctively, vehicle crime, which barely registers in the city-centre sample. This is one month of data, not a trend — for the full twelve-month picture and an actual up-or-down trend for one address, use the checker itself.
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.
See how South Wales Police compares with other forces in our police force crime rate ranking.
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.