CrimeRate’s independent analysis names Sheffield as South Yorkshire Police’s safest place and Rotherham as its highest-crime location — two cities under one force. We already had three verified July 2026 samples for Sheffield itself (city centre, Crookes, Ecclesall / Hunters Bar) from our general Sheffield post; this post adds Rotherham, the named-highest-crime city, 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.
Crookes
Ecclesall / Hunters Bar
Sheffield city centre
Rotherham
Where the reputation and the sample agree — and where they don’t
Crookes and Ecclesall / Hunters Bar — two areas with very different reputations, one studenty and residential, one among the city’s more affluent postcodes — landed on an identical 6 incidents each for the month, as we noted in our general Sheffield post; neither sample is large enough to call that more than coincidence, but it is a useful reminder that reputation and recorded crime don’t always line up neatly. Sheffield city centre itself, the busy core of the city rated safest in its force, still logged 43 incidents, led by violent crime rather than shoplifting — a different flavour from Leeds’s retail-dominated centre in our companion post. Rotherham, named highest-crime, logged almost double that at 77, with violent crime again the single largest category, but also a heavy shoplifting share and two recorded possession-of-weapons incidents that didn’t appear in Sheffield centre’s own top categories at all. As always, this is a centre-to-centre comparison for one month, not a city-wide average or a trend — it doesn’t mean every part of Rotherham is worse than every part of Sheffield, but it does show the “safest in the force” label isn’t a guarantee about any one postcode, including Sheffield’s own centre.
For every ward in Sheffield ranked by recorded crime, see Sheffield 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:
- Sheffield centre vs Rotherham — the named-safest and named-highest-crime places, centre to centre.
- Rotherham vs Ecclesall / Hunters Bar — the named-highest-crime city against Sheffield’s more affluent area.
- Rotherham vs Crookes — the named-highest-crime city against Sheffield’s studenty, residential area.
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 Sheffield post and the police force crime rate ranking. And as always: none of this replaces calling 999 in an emergency.