West Yorkshire Police publishes its neighbourhood data in just six large policing districts for Leeds, which is too coarse to tell you much about a particular part of the city. This page goes down to the 33 electoral wards instead, measured the same way: every crime recorded inside the ward’s boundary during July 2026, the most recent month published.
Across Leeds that came to 9,471 recorded incidents in the month. The typical ward recorded about 226. The quietest, Harewood, recorded 84; the busiest, Little London & Woodhouse, recorded 1,048.
All 33 Leeds wards, quietest first
Bars are relative to Little London & Woodhouse, 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, not a risk-per-person figure, and we have not turned it into a safety score. The top two wards show why.
Leeds city centre is split between two wards. Little London & Woodhouse covers the northern part of the centre, the universities and much of the student housing, and Hunslet & Riverside covers the southern part of the centre and the riverside. Between them they recorded 1,762 incidents, nearly a fifth of the city’s total. Shoplifting made up 238 of Little London & Woodhouse’s figure and 120 of Hunslet & Riverside’s: offences against shops, in the places where the shops are.
The next group — Gipton & Harehills (567), Beeston & Holbeck (473), Armley (443) and Burmantofts & Richmond Hill (437) — are dense inner-ring wards around the centre, and here the pattern is different: violence, not theft, makes up the largest share.
At the quiet end are the outer, largely residential or semi-rural wards to the north: Harewood, Moortown, Horsforth, Adel & Wharfedale and Alwoodley, with Ardsley & Robin Hood and Kippax & Methley in the south and east.
The violent crime split
Violence and sexual offences are published by the police as one merged category, so that victims cannot be identified from street-level data. Across Leeds it accounted for 3,407 of the 9,471 incidents — about 36 per cent, slightly higher than in Bristol or Sheffield.
Among wards with at least 100 incidents the share runs from 26 per cent in Otley & Yeadon to 47 per cent in Armley and in Wetherby. Wetherby is the reminder that a high share is not the same as a high number: it has one of the lowest totals in the city, and 72 violent incidents in a month.
How this was measured
Street-level crime data published by West Yorkshire Police 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 33 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 Leeds. For how Leeds compares with other cities, see crime in Leeds and the police force crime rate ranking. Ward-level ranks for other cities: Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool, Sheffield. Whatever the numbers say about an area, they are no substitute for calling 999 in an emergency.
Crime data: West Yorkshire Police 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.