The headline

In the year ending June 2026, Victoria Police recorded 44,694 offences in the City of Melbourne. Divided by its residents, that is 22,860 offences per 100,000 people, the highest rate of any Victorian council.

But the City of Melbourne is where people work, not where many of them live. It has about 2.6 workers for every resident. I wanted to see what happens to the ranking when the people who work in each council are counted as well.

As an international student I reside and study in Melbourne CBD. Melbourne CBD has the highest crime rate in Victoria however this is calculated by how many residents there are. I am just one of many that are there for the majority of the day that aren’t considered to live anywhere else in the statistics. What if we were included in the equation?

1. The ranking flips

Source: Crime Statistics Agency Victoria (2026); Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022). Rates are offences per 100,000 residents, or per 100,000 residents plus workers. Hover over a dot for the council.

Chart description: A slopegraph of 79 Victorian councils. Each line joins a council’s rank by crime rate per resident (left) to its rank once workers are counted as well (right). Melbourne falls from 1 to 28 and Yarra from 3 to 14. Latrobe, Mildura, and Greater Shepparton take the top three places.

Melbourne drops from 1st to 28th, and Yarra from 3rd to 14th. The top of the table becomes Latrobe, Mildura, and Greater Shepparton, which are all regional centres.

2. Where the rates are

Source: Crime Statistics Agency Victoria (2026); Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022, 2025). Both layers use the same colour scale so they can be compared. Use the layer control (top right) to switch between measures, and zoom in on Melbourne, which is small.

Chart description: A map of Victoria’s 79 councils coloured by crime rate. One layer uses offences per 100,000 residents and the other uses offences per 100,000 residents plus workers. The same colour scale applies to both. Darker colours mean higher rates. Hovering over a council shows its rate and rank.

3. Is it just commuters?

Source: Crime Statistics Agency Victoria (2026); Australian Bureau of Statistics (2022). Dot size is the number of offences. Colour is the share of offences that are property and deception offences. Drag a box over some dots: the same councils are highlighted in the slopegraph in section 1.

Chart description: A scatter plot with one dot per council. The horizontal axis is workers per resident and the vertical axis is offences per 100,000 residents. Dot size shows the number of offences and colour shows the property and deception share. Melbourne is far to the right at about 2.6 workers per resident. Most councils are below 1.

4. What kind of crime is it?

Source: Crime Statistics Agency Victoria (2026), Tables 02 and 04. Residential share is calculated among offences with a recorded location type (92% of offences). The line on each dot shows the range if all of the offences with no location were non-residential (left end) or residential (right end).

Chart description: Two panels for five councils and for Victoria overall. The left panel shows stacked bars of the share of offences in each offence division. The right panel shows the share of offences at residential locations as a dot with a range line. Melbourne’s residential share is about 23%. Latrobe, Mildura and Greater Shepparton are each about half.

Melbourne’s offences are mostly not at homes (23% residential, compared with 56% in Mildura). Justice procedures offences are 10% of Melbourne’s total and 30% of Greater Shepparton’s. These offences, such as breaches of orders, partly reflect how places are policed, so I describe the difference and don’t try to explain it.

5. Is this new?

Source: Crime Statistics Agency Victoria (2026), Table 01. Rates are the official rate per 100,000 residents as published in the 2026 release. Click a name in the legend to hide or show it.

Chart description: A line chart of the crime rate per 100,000 residents for each year in the release. The five councils from the earlier charts are coloured lines and the other councils are thin grey lines.

What this can and can’t tell us

  • The combined rate is one way of looking at it. Residents who work in their own council are counted twice, and visitors, students and shoppers who neither live nor work there are not counted at all. I show it next to the resident rate and not as a replacement.
  • The workers data is from 2021. It comes from the 2021 Census, taken during a lockdown that probably lowered the number of people working in the city centre. The 2026 Census results are not out yet.
  • The resident rates use estimated populations. The Crime Statistics Agency calculates them using Victoria in Future population estimates, because the latest ABS estimates were not available in time. I worked out each council’s population from the published rate and offence count.
  • Some offences have no recorded location. The location table covers 92.2% of offences, so residential shares are shares of offences with a known location. The ranges in chart 4 show how much this could matter. Missing locations were more common in councils with more justice procedures offences.
  • Counts can be revised. The data was extracted 18 days after the end of the reference period and can change between releases.

Data and method

I used three open datasets: Crime Statistics Agency Victoria’s recorded offences by council (Tables 01, 02 and 04), the 2021 Census Working Population Profile (employed persons by place of work) and the ABS 2025 council boundaries. I prepared them in R with the script 01_prepare_data.R, which standardises council names, joins the tables and checks that the totals match. All charts were made in R using plotly and leaflet.

Acknowledgement of generative AI use

I used ChatGPT as a supporting tool to polish R code for readability and improve the clarity of written explanations. All coding, data analysis, visualisation decisions, and interpretation of results were completed independently by me.

References

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2022). Census of Population and Housing: Working population profile, 2021 [Data set]. https://www.abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/datapacks

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2025). Local government areas - 2025 - GDA2020 [Data set]. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/standards/australian-statistical-geography-standard-asgs-edition-3/jul2021-jun2026/access-and-downloads/digital-boundary-files

Crime Statistics Agency. (2026). Data tables: Recorded offences by local government area, year ending June 2026 [Data set]. State Government of Victoria. https://www.crimestatistics.vic.gov.au/crime-statistics/latest-victorian-crime-data/download-data