Ask which parts of Birmingham are the most dangerous and you will get a list of names that has been passed around for twenty years. This is the same question answered with the month’s actual record: every crime logged by West Midlands Police inside each of Birmingham’s 44 policing neighbourhoods during July 2026.
The city recorded 14,279 incidents that month. The median neighbourhood recorded about 298. One neighbourhood recorded 1,365 — nearly three times the next highest — and it is the one that almost nobody lives in.
What are the worst areas in Birmingham?
In July 2026 the highest crime counts in Birmingham were the City Centre (1,365 incidents, one in six of them shoplifting), then Lozells and East Handsworth (506), Aston (451), Sparkbrook (411) and Hodge Hill (405). Among areas where people actually live, the inner ring north and east of the centre records the most crime, and around half of it is violence.
All 44 Birmingham neighbourhoods, highest first
Bars are relative to the City Centre, the highest count in Birmingham.
The City Centre number is mostly about shops
Before anyone reads the top row as a warning, look at what it contains. Of the City Centre’s 1,365 incidents, 232 were shoplifting — one offence in six, committed against retailers on New Street and in the Bullring rather than against people walking around. Anti-social behaviour accounted for 39, robbery for 34, vehicle crime for 47.
Violence and sexual offences, published by the police as one merged category, accounted for 568. That is a real figure and the largest single block, but it is spread across an area that receives hundreds of thousands of visitors a week, most of them concentrated into a few streets on Friday and Saturday nights. A count without a denominator says where incidents happen, not how likely one is to happen to you.
Where the residential picture is toughest
Strip out the city centre and the pattern changes. The highest counts among neighbourhoods where people actually live are Lozells and East Handsworth (506), Aston (451) and Sparkbrook (411). All three sit in the inner ring north and east of the centre, all three are densely populated, and in all three violence makes up around half the total — 253 of Lozells and East Handsworth’s incidents, 218 of Aston’s, 176 of Sparkbrook’s.
That inner-ring concentration is the clearest signal in the data. It is also worth noticing what is not at the top. Handsworth’s name comes up in these conversations more than almost any other part of Birmingham, but the two neighbourhoods carrying the name — Handsworth Wood at 276 and Soho Road at 265 — both sit in the lower half of the table, below Moseley and Kings Heath and below Edgbaston.
And where it is quietest
The four lowest counts in the city are Sutton Four Oaks (115), Jewellery Quarter (136), Sutton New Hall (150) and Nechells (164). Three of those are the Sutton Coldfield neighbourhoods on Birmingham’s northern edge — low-density, largely residential, with little through traffic. The Jewellery Quarter and Nechells are different cases: both are small in area and heavily commercial, so there are simply fewer places for crime to be recorded.
Across the whole city, violence and sexual offences came to 6,374 of the 14,279 incidents, about 45 per cent — a noticeably higher share than the comparable figure in our Cardiff ward breakdown, where it was under a third.
What these areas are
These are West Midlands Police neighbourhoods, not Birmingham City Council wards. The force divides the city into 44 policing areas, which is why you will see Sutton Coldfield as four separate entries and the city centre as one, and why the names do not always match the electoral ward you would find on a council map. They are the units the police themselves use, and the ones the crime data is naturally organised around.
How this was measured
Street-level crime published by West Midlands Police through data.police.uk for July 2026, the most recent month available. For each neighbourhood we counted every crime falling inside its published boundary — the real polygon, not a circle drawn around a centre point — so no incident is counted twice and no neighbourhood is measured using a neighbour’s high street.
The usual two limits apply. This is recorded crime, so anything not reported is absent, and the published location of each incident is snapped to a nearby anonymised point rather than the exact address, to keep victims unidentifiable. These figures describe areas, not addresses, and they are not a verdict on anyone who lives in them.
Is Handsworth dangerous?
It depends which part. In July 2026 Lozells and East Handsworth recorded 506 incidents, the second-highest count of Birmingham’s 44 police neighbourhoods, and half of them (253) were violence or sexual offences. The two other neighbourhoods carrying the Handsworth name, Handsworth Wood (276) and Soho Road (265), both sat in the lower half of the table.
Check a specific address
A neighbourhood covers a lot of ground. For twelve months of data around one postcode, or a direct comparison of two, use our address checker. For the short answer, see is Birmingham safe? For the other side of this question, see safest areas in Birmingham; for the city in national context, crime in Birmingham and our breakdown of violent crime specifically. None of it replaces calling 999 in an emergency.
Crime data: West Midlands Police street-level crime via data.police.uk, July 2026, Open Government Licence v3.0.