Liverpool redrew its wards in 2023 into 64 small ones, many covering only a few thousand homes. That makes it one of the few big cities where a ward-level table gets close to neighbourhood level. This page ranks all 64, 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 6,404 recorded incidents in the month. The typical ward recorded about 72. The quietest, Grassendale & Cressington, recorded 13; the busiest, City Centre North, recorded 731.
All 64 Liverpool wards, quietest first
Bars are relative to City Centre North, 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. Because Liverpool’s wards are small and unequal in what they contain, the gap between top and bottom is very large, and most of it is about footfall.
City Centre North takes in Lime Street, much of the main shopping area and a large part of the nightlife. Shoplifting accounts for 129 of its 731 incidents and anti-social behaviour for 93. City Centre South (385) covers the southern half of the centre, including the Ropewalks. Together the two city-centre wards recorded more than a sixth of the city’s total. The next three — Kensington & Fairfield (350), Walton (261) and County (202) — are dense residential wards in the inner north and east, where violence rather than theft makes up the largest share.
The quiet end is the south of the city — Grassendale & Cressington, Allerton, Woolton Village, Calderstones and Gateacre — where each ward recorded fewer than 25 incidents in the month. With numbers that small, one busy week can move a ward several places, so read the bottom third of the table as a group rather than as a strict order.
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 Liverpool it accounted for 2,496 of the 6,404 incidents — about 39 per cent, a higher share than in Bristol, Leeds or Sheffield, largely because theft and burglary make up a smaller part of Liverpool’s recorded total.
Among wards with at least 100 incidents the share runs from 24 per cent in City Centre North to 52 per cent in Tuebrook Breckside Park and 54 per cent in Fazakerley West.
Drug offences reflect policing, not only prevalence
Liverpool recorded 565 drug offences in the month — nearly twice Leeds’s figure, from a smaller total. Drug offences are almost always recorded because the police found them, through stop and search or targeted operations, rather than because someone reported them. A high count tells you where enforcement is concentrated as much as where drugs are. For that reason the ranking above is best read alongside the category detail, not as a single verdict.
How this was measured
Street-level crime data published by Merseyside 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 64 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 an area, not a street. 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 Liverpool. For how Liverpool compares with other cities, see crime in Liverpool and the police force crime rate ranking. Ward-level ranks for other cities: Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds, Sheffield. Whatever the numbers say about an area, they are no substitute for calling 999 in an emergency.
Crime data: Merseyside 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.