Most pages about crime in Bristol either give you one city-wide number or pick out a few neighbourhoods. This one covers all 34 of the city’s electoral wards, measured the same way: every crime recorded inside the ward’s boundary during July 2026, the most recent month published by the police.
Across the city that came to 6,412 recorded incidents in the month. The typical ward recorded about 159. The quietest ward, St George Troopers Hill, recorded 30; the busiest, Central, recorded 994 — about a sixth of everything recorded in Bristol, from one ward.
All 34 Bristol wards, quietest first
Bars are relative to Central, the highest count in the city.
What this ranking is, and what it is not
It is a count of incidents recorded in a place. It is not a risk-per-person figure, and we have deliberately not converted it into a safety score. The top of the table shows why.
Central takes in Broadmead, Cabot Circus and most of the city-centre nightlife. Shoplifting alone accounts for 160 of its 994 incidents, and anti-social behaviour for another 138. These are offences concentrated where shops, bars and transport are, and the people involved are overwhelmingly visitors and workers rather than residents. The next four — Lawrence Hill (411), Ashley (374), Hartcliffe and Withywood (309) and Lockleaze (299) — are a mix of inner-city wards next to the centre and large outer estates.
Lockleaze is a useful example of why the detail matters: 86 of its 299 incidents were shoplifting, which points to retail sites rather than homes. Take that away and it sits in the middle of the table.
The quiet end — St George Troopers Hill, Cotham, Stoke Bishop, Clifton and Redland — is mainly residential. Clifton and Clifton Down are unusual in one respect: vehicle crime, not violence, is their most common recorded offence.
The violent crime split
Violence and sexual offences are published by the police as one merged category, deliberately, so that victims cannot be identified from street-level data. Across Bristol it accounted for 2,100 of the 6,412 incidents — about a third.
The share varies more than the totals suggest. Among wards with at least 100 incidents it runs from 23 per cent in Central, where theft and anti-social behaviour dominate, to 47 per cent in Stockwood and 48 per cent in Avonmouth and Lawrence Weston. A busy ward is not necessarily a violent one, and a quieter ward can have a higher violent share of a smaller number.
How this was measured
Street-level crime data published by Avon and Somerset Constabulary through data.police.uk, covering July 2026, the most recent month available at the time of writing. Ward boundaries are the Office for National Statistics’ published electoral ward boundaries (December 2024). For each of the 34 wards we queried every crime falling inside that boundary and counted the results by category. The counts are exact counts of the returned records, not estimates.
To keep each query within the police API’s limits, every boundary was traced with about 45 points rather than its full outline. The effect is small, but an incident recorded right on the line between two wards can land on either side of it, so treat neighbouring wards separated by a handful of incidents as level.
Two caveats that apply to every number here. First, this is recorded crime — incidents reported to and logged by the police. Anything not reported is not in it. Second, the published location of each crime is snapped to a nearby anonymised point rather than the exact address, so a single street corner in the data may represent several addresses around it. That is a privacy protection working as designed, and it means these figures describe areas, not addresses.
Look up a specific address
A ward is still a large area. To see twelve months of data around one postcode, or to compare two directly, use our address checker.
For a shorter guide to the quieter parts of the city, see safest areas in Bristol. For how Bristol compares with other cities, see crime in Bristol and the police force crime rate ranking. Ward-level ranks for other cities: Cardiff, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield. Whatever the numbers say about an area, they are no substitute for calling 999 in an emergency.
Crime data: Avon and Somerset Constabulary street-level crime via data.police.uk, July 2026, Open Government Licence v3.0. Ward boundaries: Office for National Statistics, Open Government Licence v3.0.