CrimeRate’s independent analysis names Leeds as West Yorkshire Police’s safest place and Halifax as its highest-crime location — two very different-sized towns under one force. We already had three verified July 2026 samples for Leeds itself (city centre, Headingley, Roundhay) from our general Leeds post; this post adds Halifax, the named-highest-crime town, for comparison.
What one month actually showed
Each figure is every recorded crime within a small area (roughly 250–300 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.
Roundhay
Headingley
Leeds city centre
Halifax
Where the reputation and the sample agree — and where they don’t
Roundhay, a Leeds suburb rather than one of CrimeRate’s two named places, was by far the quietest sample here at 9 incidents — a reminder that a force-wide “safest place” label describes a whole city, not every postcode inside it. Leeds city centre itself — the busy core of the city rated safest in its force — still logged 52 incidents in the month, half of them shoplifting, which fits its role as the region’s main retail hub rather than pointing to anything more serious. Halifax, named highest-crime, logged nearly double that at 93, and the mix looked different in kind as much as scale: violent crime and anti-social behaviour each took roughly a quarter of the total, with shoplifting and public order close behind — a broader spread across heavier categories, not just a bigger number. This is a centre-to-centre comparison, not a city-wide one, and one month in one small area is a snapshot, not a verdict: it does not mean every part of Halifax is worse than every part of Leeds. What it does show is that even Leeds’s own busiest postcode, in the city carrying the “safest” label, isn’t automatically quiet just because the citywide figure says so.
For every ward in Leeds ranked by recorded crime, see Leeds crime by ward.
See it for yourself
These open live with both postcodes already loaded, using twelve months of data rather than the single month above:
- Leeds centre vs Halifax — the named-safest and named-highest-crime places, centre to centre.
- Halifax vs Roundhay — the named-highest-crime town against the quietest Leeds suburb.
- Halifax vs Headingley — the named-highest-crime town against Leeds’s own nightlife district.
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 places or the people who live there. For the full force-wide picture, see our Leeds post and the police force crime rate ranking. And as always: none of this replaces calling 999 in an emergency.