Our general Birmingham post and safest areas post both ranked six West Midlands Police areas by total recorded crime. Here we ask a narrower question: of those crimes, how many were specifically violent crime — and does the “safest overall” ranking still hold once you filter to just that one category?
What one month actually showed
Using the same six areas and the same July 2026 window as our other Birmingham posts, this time filtered to the police API’s own violent-crime category only, counted by hand and cross-checked against each record’s unique ID.
Birmingham centre (Ladywood)
Wolverhampton
West Bromwich
Solihull
Stourbridge
Sutton Coldfield
Where the overall ranking and the violent-crime ranking split
The raw ranking barely moves: Birmingham centre and Wolverhampton stay at the top by count either way. But the mix tells a different story than the totals alone. Sutton Coldfield and Solihull recorded the exact same overall total in our safest areas post (26 each) — yet Sutton Coldfield’s crime was only 27% violent against Solihull’s 38%. Two areas that looked identical on the headline number turn out to have a noticeably different mix once you split it apart. West Bromwich shows the same pattern from the other side: it tied with Stourbridge on the overall count (21 each), but 52% of West Bromwich’s crime was violent against Stourbridge’s 38% — the same total, a different kind of month.
None of this means West Bromwich or Solihull are “more dangerous” in some deeper sense than their tied counterpart. It means a single combined number, even a genuinely equal one, can hide two different underlying pictures — which is exactly why we keep breaking these figures down rather than quoting one rate per place.
See it for yourself
These open live with both postcodes already loaded, using twelve months of data rather than the single month above:
- Birmingham centre vs Wolverhampton — the two highest violent-crime counts here, head to head.
- Sutton Coldfield vs Solihull — tied on overall crime, split on violent-crime share.
- West Bromwich vs Stourbridge — also tied overall, also split on the mix.
The limits of this data
This is recorded crime — what was reported and logged, not everything that happened — from one category, in 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 fuller picture, see our Birmingham post, the safest areas in Birmingham post, and the police force crime rate ranking. And as always: none of this replaces calling 999 in an emergency.