How the Safety Score works

The four steps

1. Count recorded crime. Every victimisation NZ Police recorded in the suburb over the last 12 months.
2. Weight it by harm. Each offence is weighted using the NZ Crime Harm Index, so serious crimes such as assault and burglary count for much more than minor theft.
3. Divide by residents. Total harm per 1,000 residents, using the 2023 Census population, so big and small suburbs can be compared fairly.
4. Compare with New Zealand. The score is the share of ranked NZ suburbs with more harm per resident. A score of 80 means safer than about 80% of them.

Score and crime rate are different

Suburb pages show both. The crime rate (crimes per 1,000 residents a year) counts every offence equally. The score is harm-weighted. A suburb with lots of minor shoplifting can have a high crime rate but a middling score; one with a few serious offences can be the other way round.

Who is not ranked

• Fewer than 500 residents. Business districts, ports and parks have few residents, so crime that happens there produces extreme per-resident rates.
• No matched crime records yet. Usually new subdivisions whose boundaries are not yet linked to Police data. Zero recorded crime there means "no data", not "no crime".
• Police records stop partway through the period. When Stats NZ redraws a boundary, Police start recording crime under the new area, so the old one looks artificially safe.

These areas still have a page, with a note explaining why they are not ranked.

Crimes without an exact location

NZ Police record each crime against a meshblock, the smallest Stats NZ area, always using the 2013 set of meshblock codes. About a third of those meshblocks have since been split, so their codes are not in today’s boundaries. We match each one to today’s suburbs using Stats NZ’s 2013 meshblock boundaries. Almost all (97%) lie within a single suburb; the few that straddle two suburbs have their records shared between them by how many of today’s meshblocks each part contains.

This applies to records from October 2023 onward, which cover every current score. Older records, which feed only long-term trend charts, are still placed by an estimate: where only the wider area (an older Stats NZ “Area Unit”) can be matched and it covers several suburbs, its records are shared among them. Each record is counted once. Changed October 2026: until then records with a split meshblock were counted under one suburb in their wider area, and about 1 in 20 Police records was left out, which made some suburbs, including shopping centres and airports, look far safer or less safe than they were. Some scores changed when this was corrected.

Limits

• Only crime reported to Police is counted, and some crime (for example family violence) is under-reported.
• Crime is counted where it happens, which is why town centres and shopping areas rank low.
• A score describes a whole suburb, not a street, and is a starting point rather than a guarantee.

Sources and updates

NZ Police victimisation data, Stats NZ 2023 Census populations, and the NZ Crime Harm Index, processed by crimestats.co.nz. Scores are recalculated monthly when Police publish new data. Full details are on the data sources page. Police data to August 2026

Common questions