Swansea is an unusual city to measure. It runs from a dense city centre through terraced inner suburbs out to the Gower peninsula, which is largely farmland and coast. Averaging across that produces a number that describes nowhere in particular. So here is the month’s record for each part of it separately: every crime logged by South Wales Police inside each of the city’s 31 neighbourhoods during July 2026.
The city recorded 1,945 incidents. The median neighbourhood recorded 41. One neighbourhood recorded 500 — more than a quarter of everything in Swansea, and three and a half times the next highest.
All 31 Swansea neighbourhoods, quietest first
Bars are relative to Castle, the highest count in the city.
The quiet end is genuinely quiet
What stands out about Swansea is how low the bottom of the table goes. Mayals, Pen-clawdd and Pontlliw and Tircoed each recorded six incidents in the whole month. Bishopston and Fairwood recorded eight. For comparison, the quietest ward in Cardiff recorded 24, and the quietest neighbourhood in Birmingham recorded 115.
These are the Gower and peninsula communities plus the rural fringe north of the city — low density, few shops, little through traffic. Of Fairwood’s eight incidents, one was violent. Of Pen-clawdd’s six, one was. At these counts a single incident moves a place several positions, so the exact order at the top of this list means very little; the size of the numbers is the point.
The suburbs most people are actually choosing between sit a little further down and still low: Mumbles at 45, West Cross at 37, Dunvant and Killay at 22, Gowerton at 17, Sketty at 84.
Castle ward is a quarter of Swansea’s total
Castle covers the city centre: Wind Street, the Kingsway, the retail core and the marina approach. Its 500 incidents are 26 per cent of everything recorded in Swansea that month, from a fraction of a per cent of its residents.
This is the same shape seen in Cardiff, Birmingham and every other city in this series. A city-centre ward is a place people travel to, drink in, shop in and pass through — the recorded crime follows the footfall, not the residents. Of Castle’s total, 164 incidents were in the merged violence and sexual offences category.
The genuinely residential neighbourhoods with the highest counts are Morriston (144), Penderry (117) and Townhill (100). Townhill is the one worth a second look: at 100 incidents it sits mid-table by volume, but 53 of those were violent — the highest violent share of any Swansea neighbourhood, and higher in proportion than Castle’s.
So is Swansea safe?
As a whole city, 1,945 recorded incidents in a month is modest for a UK city of Swansea’s size — Cardiff recorded 4,505 in the same month and Birmingham 14,279, though both are considerably larger. Violence and sexual offences made up about 38 per cent of Swansea’s total.
But “is Swansea safe” is not really a question the city-level number can answer, because the gap between Castle and Mayals is more than eighty-fold. Where in Swansea, and at what time, does almost all the work.
How this was measured
Street-level crime published by South Wales Police through data.police.uk for July 2026, the most recent month available. Each neighbourhood was counted using its own published boundary — the real polygon rather than a circle around a centre point — so nothing is counted twice and no area is measured using its neighbour’s high street.
Two limits apply throughout. This is recorded crime: what was reported and logged, not everything that happened. And each incident’s published location is snapped to a nearby anonymised point rather than the exact address, a deliberate privacy measure that keeps victims unidentifiable. These numbers describe areas, not addresses, and they are not a verdict on the people who live in them.
Check a specific address
For twelve months of data around one Swansea postcode, or a direct comparison between two, use our address checker, or zoom in on the crime map to see which streets the incidents cluster on. For the same treatment of the other South Wales city, see our Cardiff ward breakdown and safest areas in Cardiff, or the police force crime rate ranking for how South Wales Police compares nationally. None of this replaces calling 999 in an emergency.
Crime data: South Wales Police street-level crime via data.police.uk, July 2026, Open Government Licence v3.0.