## [1] "22nd"
## # A tibble: 10 × 2
##     Year  rate
##    <dbl> <dbl>
##  1  2017 6408.
##  2  2018 5918.
##  3  2019 5879.
##  4  2020 6124.
##  5  2021 5744.
##  6  2022 5127.
##  7  2023 5434.
##  8  2024 5866.
##  9  2025 6784.
## 10  2026 6464.
## [1] 22
## [1] 79

I’ve lived in Sunshine since I moved to Melbourne to study at RMIT. Whenever I tell someone where I live, I usually get a look, or a joke about locking my car. Brimbank has a reputation, and I’ve never really known if it’s fair. So for this assignment I decided to check the actual numbers for the place I live.

1. Brimbank isn’t the crime capital people think it is

In the year to June 2026, Brimbank had 14,686 recorded criminal incidents. When you adjust for population, that puts it 22nd out of 79 councils in Victoria. It’s a bit above the state average, but nowhere near the top. Melbourne CBD, Yarra, Port Phillip and even regional areas like Latrobe and Mildura are all higher.

🔎 Try it: click on any grey line to see where your own council sits compared to Brimbank. Double-click to go back.

Chart description: a line chart showing crime rates for 79 Victorian councils from 2017 to 2026. Brimbank is the orange line, sitting in the middle of the pack and just above the dashed blue Victorian average.

Source: Crime Statistics Agency Victoria (2026), Data Tables LGA Criminal Incidents, Year Ending June 2026. The Victorian average is all incidents divided by the total population of all councils.

So overall, the reputation doesn’t really match the data. But when I broke the numbers down by type of crime, I found something I didn’t expect. What’s changed in Brimbank isn’t how much crime there is, it’s what kind.

## [1] 50170    10
## # A tibble: 6 × 9
##    Year lga    subgroup                     inc    pop  rate offence    rk     n
##   <dbl> <chr>  <chr>                      <dbl>  <dbl> <dbl> <chr>   <dbl> <int>
## 1  2017 Alpine B321 Residential non-aggr…    10 12687.  78.8 Home b…    79    79
## 2  2017 Alpine B41 Motor vehicle theft        2 12687.  15.8 Car st…    79    79
## 3  2017 Alpine B42 Steal from a motor ve…     9 12687.  70.9 Stolen…    79    79
## 4  2017 Ararat B321 Residential non-aggr…    50 11796. 424.  Home b…    39    79
## 5  2017 Ararat B41 Motor vehicle theft       11 11796.  93.3 Car st…    67    79
## 6  2017 Ararat B42 Steal from a motor ve…    34 11796. 288.  Stolen…    60    79
## # A tibble: 6 × 4
##    Year offence            rate    rk
##   <dbl> <chr>             <dbl> <dbl>
## 1  2017 Home burglary      573.    12
## 2  2017 Car stolen         329.    12
## 3  2017 Stolen from a car 1157.    11
## 4  2026 Home burglary      238.    33
## 5  2026 Car stolen         513.     8
## 6  2026 Stolen from a car 1455.     8

2. Burglars stopped coming inside. They went to the driveway.

This is the part that surprised me most. Back in 2017, Brimbank was the 12th worst council in Victoria for home burglaries. By 2026 it had dropped to 33rd, and the rate (238 per 100k) is now actually lower than the state average (250).

Car crime went the opposite way. Things stolen from cars hit 1,455 per 100k in 2026, almost 50% higher than the Victorian rate. Brimbank is now 8th in the state for both stolen cars and theft from cars. So the joke about locking my car is, unfortunately, pretty accurate.

🔎 Try it: hover over any orange point to see where Brimbank ranked in Victoria that year. Click “Brimbank” or “Victoria” in the legend to hide that line in all three panels.

Chart description: three small line charts comparing Brimbank (orange) with Victoria (blue dashed). Home burglaries in Brimbank fall sharply and end up below the state rate. Car thefts and thefts from cars rise and stay well above the state rate.

Source: Crime Statistics Agency Victoria (2026), Data Tables LGA Criminal Incidents, Year Ending June 2026. Offence subgroups B321, B41 and B42. Rates calculated from CSA incident counts and population estimates. 

## # A tibble: 3 × 4
##    Year loc                               inc share
##   <dbl> <chr>                           <dbl> <dbl>
## 1  2026 Homes & residential              5033  36.5
## 2  2026 Streets, shops & public spaces   5666  41.1
## 3  2026 Other (workplaces, farms, etc.)  3092  22.4

3. In 2026, crime moved out of homes and onto the street

The location data backs this up. For most of the last ten years, the most common place for crime in Brimbank was someone’s home. But in 2026, for the first time, more incidents happened in community spaces like streets, footpaths, car parks, shops and train stations than inside or around homes. That lines up with what I see walking around Sunshine: the risk isn’t so much someone breaking in, it’s what happens to your car parked out the front.

🔎 Try it: use the buttons in the top right to switch between the number of incidents and each location’s share of the total.

Chart description: line chart of Brimbank incidents by type of location. Incidents in and around homes stay between about 5,000 and 5,900 a year. Incidents on streets, in shops and in public spaces climb after 2022 and pass homes in 2026.

Source: Crime Statistics Agency Victoria (2026), Data Tables LGA Criminal Incidents, Year Ending June 2026. Location Division, Table 04.

4. It’s not one “bad” suburb, it’s almost everywhere

I wanted to check whether this was just one hotspot dragging the numbers up. Each row below is a Brimbank suburb. The blue dot is 2017 and the orange dot is 2026, so if orange sits to the right, car crime became a bigger part of that suburb’s crime. That happened in 17 out of 19 suburbs. The dots also got smaller in most places, because there were fewer home burglaries.

🔎 Try it: hover over any dot for that suburb’s numbers. Click “2017” or “2026” in the legend to show just one year.

Chart description: dumbbell chart of 19 Brimbank suburbs. Each row joins a blue dot (2017) and an orange dot (2026) showing car crime as a percentage of all incidents. Dot size is the number of home burglaries. In 17 suburbs the orange dot is further right, and most dots are smaller in 2026.

Source: Crime Statistics Agency Victoria (2026), Data Tables LGA Criminal Incidents, Year Ending June 2026. Suburb/Town data, Table 03. Car crime = B41 + B42; home burglary = B311 + B321. Only suburbs with at least 100 incidents every year are shown. CSA doesn’t publish suburb populations, so these are counts, not rates.

5. And most of it never gets solved

This is the bit that matters most if you actually live here. Car crime is easy to commit and hard to trace, and as it has grown, so has the share of crime where nobody is ever charged. In 2017, about 51% of Brimbank incidents were unsolved. In 2026 it was 60%, higher than the Victorian average of 55%. Over the same time, the share where someone was actually charged dropped from 41% to 28%.

🔎 Try it: use the dropdown in the top right to switch between Unsolved, Charges laid and Solved, no charges.

Chart description: line chart of the percentage of incidents still unsolved 30 days after being reported, for Brimbank (orange) and Victoria (blue dashed). Brimbank rises from about 51% in 2017 to 60% in 2026, above Victoria. A dropdown switches to charges laid, which falls over the same period.

Source: Crime Statistics Agency Victoria (2026), Data Tables LGA Criminal Incidents, Year Ending June 2026. Charge Status, Table 05. Investigation status recorded 30 days after the incident was reported.

What I took away from this

Before doing this assignment, I kind of assumed the reputation was at least partly true. The data told me something more specific. Homes in Brimbank are actually safer than they were ten years ago, but cars parked on the street are a lot more exposed, and when something happens, the person responsible usually isn’t caught. That’s a very different problem from “the west is dangerous”, and it needs different answers: better street lighting, off-street parking, steering locks and cameras, rather than people being scared to live here.

For me personally, it means I’m less worried about my house and a lot more careful about where I park.

Data notes

  • All figures are recorded criminal incidents, so they only include what was reported to and recorded by Victoria Police, not every crime that happens. Some of the rise in car crime could be because people report it for insurance.
  • “2026” means the year ending June 2026 (July 2025 to June 2026), and the same applies to every other year.
  • Council rates use the population figures behind CSA’s published rates. Suburb figures are counts because CSA doesn’t publish suburb populations.

References

References

Allaire, J. J., Xie, Y., Dervieux, C., McPherson, J., Luraschi, J., Ushey, K., Atkins, A., Wickham, H., Cheng, J., Chang, W., & Iannone, R. (2024). rmarkdown: Dynamic documents for R (Version 2.29) [R package]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rmarkdown

Cheng, J., Sievert, C., Schloerke, B., Chang, W., Xie, Y., & Allen, J. (2024). crosstalk: Inter-widget interactivity for HTML widgets (Version 1.2.1) [R package]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=crosstalk

Crime Statistics Agency. (2026). Data tables LGA criminal incidents year ending June 2026 [Data set]. https://www.crimestatistics.vic.gov.au/crime-statistics/latest-victorian-crime-data/download-data

Sievert, C. (2020). Interactive web-based data visualization with R, plotly, and shiny. Chapman and Hall/CRC. https://plotly-r.com

Anthropic.(2026).Claude [Large Language Model].https://claude.ai/