CrimeRate’s ward-level analysis of South Wales Police, already used for the force’s overall rate in our general Cardiff post, goes a level deeper than city vs city: it names Castle — the Cardiff Castle and city-centre ward — as the single highest-crime location anywhere in the force area, and Cyncoed, a leafy Cardiff suburb, as one of its three safest. Both are Cardiff wards, so this is a genuine within-city comparison, not just Cardiff vs Swansea.
What one month actually showed
Each figure is every recorded crime within a small area (roughly 200–300 metres across, kept small enough to stay well under the police API’s 500-record cap) around one representative postcode, for July 2026, counted by hand from the raw data. Cardiff centre and City Road are the same verified samples already published in our general Cardiff post; Cyncoed is new.
Cyncoed
Llandaff
City Road (Roath)
Cardiff centre (Castle ward)
Where the reputation and the sample agree — and where they don’t
This is one of the cleaner matches we’ve found in this series. Castle ward — officially more than six times Cyncoed’s crime index over a full year — produced 28 incidents in a month against Cyncoed’s single incident, the same gap in direction the long-run figures describe. Cyncoed’s one incident also landed on exactly the same count as Llandaff, a different Cardiff suburb entirely: two quiet, leafy, mostly residential areas a few miles apart producing an identical one-month number, which is what you’d expect from two places that are both genuinely low-activity, not a coincidence needing explanation the way some ties elsewhere in this series have been. City Road sits in between, closer to Castle’s end of the scale than to the two suburbs — consistent with it being a dedicated nightlife strip rather than a residential ward.
See it for yourself
These open live with both postcodes already loaded, using twelve months of data rather than the single month above:
- Cyncoed vs Cardiff centre — the force’s named-safest and named-highest-crime wards, head to head.
- Cyncoed vs Llandaff — two quiet suburbs that tied in our one-month sample.
- Cyncoed vs City Road — the safest ward against Roath’s nightlife strip.
The limits of this data
This is recorded crime — what was reported and logged, not everything that happened — from one month, in small areas chosen to stay well under the police API’s reporting cap. It is not a verdict on any of these wards or the people who live there. For the full picture, see our Cardiff post, the police force crime rate ranking, or our breakdown of specifically violent crime across these same four wards. And as always: none of this replaces calling 999 in an emergency.