From Melbourne’s ‘Smack Street’ to New York’s TikTok car theft: How our crime rate compares with other big cities

“A lot of what’s happening in the US and Canada is around fentanyl, and so we’re very, very worried about fentanyl in Australia,” he said.

Melbourne is in a privileged position. Fentanyl, which can be 50 times stronger than heroin, has yet to appear on the street and wreak the same level of havoc it has in North America.

As part of this masthead’s Home Safe series, we are examining how Melbourne’s crime rate compares with London, New York, Berlin, Tokyo and Montreal. We’re also looking at the role crime plays in our city, what it means for others, and patterns over the past few decades.

Melbourne scored 73 on The Economist’s Safe Cities Index in 2021, ranking behind London, which scored 74.4, and Tokyo on 73.3, but in front of New York City on 66.9.

The index considers different metrics and gives a rounded picture of the interaction of economic security and the effectiveness of police and the criminal justice system.

Statistics compiled by The Age show that the homicide rate in London and Montreal is lower than in Melbourne. Berlin’s is slightly higher and New York City’s considerably higher.

The robbery rate is much lower in Melbourne than comparable police departments in London and Montreal.

On the whole, however, crime in metropolitan areas has decreased in the past few decades.

The ‘incredible success story’ of New York City

This includes cities with a relatively dangerous reputation, like New York City, says American crime analyst Jeff Asher.

“You can compare New York with where it was 30 years ago, where it was in the ’90s, and it’s like, all of these crime figures are laughably small,” he says. “You’ve had this incredible success story within New York.”

This success story is relative: the homicide rate in New York City is still four times higher than in Melbourne, at 5.25 per 100,000 people compared to Victoria’s 1.26 per 100,000. But it’s far lower than it was.

“Just going over the numbers, the 30-year change in murder is minus 80 per cent, rape is minus 60 per cent almost, robberies minus 80 per cent, assaults minus 33 per cent, burglaries minus 86 per cent,” Asher says.

But drugs remain a problem. Data released in September showed that overdose deaths in New York City increased by 12 per cent from 2021 to 2022, with fentanyl detected in 81 per cent of drug overdose deaths.

In the past 12 months, the city also recorded an increase in gun violence, leading to a New York Police Department crackdown. Asher says that police are also grappling with unexpected sources for crime, like social media.

For example, Asher says, he traced a spike in motor vehicle theft to a single video uploaded on TikTok in July 2022, showing how to steal a type of car.

“Auto theft is up 60 per cent over the last two years in New York,” he says.

The rate of car theft in Victoria has remained fairly stable over the past eight years, with the highest rate recorded by police in 2017.

A city of protest in Berlin

Crime can also manifest along the fault lines of social and political cohesion.

Professor Marc Coester, criminologist at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, says Berlin has 19 protests a day, or about 7000 a year.

“You can imagine most demonstrations are peaceful, but if you have 19 demonstrations per day, you will always see violence against police officers and counterprotesters in some form,” he says.

Coester says Berlin has experienced politically motivated crime as far-right activists motivated by racism target Green and left-wing politicians, sometimes with arson.

Berlin’s homicide rate is also higher than Melbourne’s, at 1.6 per 100,00 people, in 2022.

One event from about 11 months ago sticks in people’s minds. On New Year’s Eve 2022, hundreds of migrant youth and men who live in the Neukolln quarter in the centre of Berlin, clashed with police. It was the culmination of years of offending in the city centre, the cultural and economic limitations diaspora communities face, and the limited employment opportunities for migrants.

Rioters used pyrotechnics and fireworks to damage property, leaving dozens of police officers, firefighters, rescue workers, pedestrians and journalists injured. Authorities detained 145 people.

Coester said the event caused anxiety in the community and gave the far right a pretext to oppose further immigration and demonise migrants.

Like in most cities, Coester says, crime is concentrated in the centre of Berlin. In 2022, there were 14,135 offences per 100,000 people in the city, with 519,827 offences recorded by police. Most of those offences, Coester says, were fraud and theft: cars, shoplifting, and burglary.

Like in Melbourne, policymakers are looking closely at how to reach young offenders and intervene earlier before criminal behaviour becomes entrenched.

“There were, so far, three summits against youth violence initiated by the governing mayor after the New Year’s riots,” he says.

The German government has invested more than €100 million ($164 million) in social programs aimed at reducing crime, including measures for schools, social work, prevention programs for parents, job initiatives and sport.

Montreal: Sharp rise in violence in peaceful city

As in Melbourne, a focus for Montreal police is gun crime.

Though gun-related offences have remained low compared to US cities, the homicide rate in the Canadian city has risen consistently over the past five years, from 24 in 2017 to 41 in 2022.

“There’s been a sharp rise in violence in the last three years and a lot of gun discharges as well,” explains Etienne Blais, a criminologist at the University of Montreal, and life-long resident of the city.

“If you compare it to American cities like New York, Boston, Chicago or even Philadelphia, we register a fraction of what you will find in the States, and as in Australia, it’s quite safe to walk in the streets,” he says.

Victoria and Montreal have very similar rates of car theft, with Victoria at 221.2 per 100,000 people compared to Montreal’s 223.29. But, when it comes to burglary, Victoria’s rate is much higher at 446.9 per 100,000 people, whereas Montreal sits at just 146.93 in 2022.

As in Berlin and Melbourne, police are focusing on youth crime, with a few high-profile incidents that shocked the community.

“We had a case where teenagers, they were 14, were riding their scooter and they decided to shoot at some people who were living in on a block that was owned by a rival gang,” he says.

Young men involved in gun violence appear to be getting younger, he says, and account for a larger portion of people accused of perpetrating violent crime.

“We haven’t seen that – people, from 14, getting guns, shooting guns, it’s quite new,” he says.

Canada is also monitoring fentanyl trafficking closely and is investing in safe injecting facilities, called safe consumption sites (SCS) around the country.

There were about 4.3 million visits to these sites between 2017 and June 2023, according to the Canadian government. The busiest of the 39 centres in Canada record more than 400 visits a day.

“There have been hundreds of people dying every day because of overdoses and drugs that were cut with fentanyl,” Blais says. Community groups have begun investing in testing devices so users can avoid the drug, he says.

Europe’s largest police force understaffed

Professor Emmeline Taylor from the City, University of London, is a leading voice in British criminology.

She says that London has a vibrant, lively city centre, where some of the richest people in the country live close to some of the most disadvantaged.

“As with any large metropolitan city, London experiences a variety of crime types, from complex violent cases to organised crime to more minor infractions,” she says.

As in Melbourne, police are concerned about a growing trend among young offenders.

“In particular, knife crime is a concern, particularly amongst young people. The total number of knife offences in the capital increased 90 per cent between 2011 and 2021. Injury with intent to cause serious harm increased by 68 per cent and fatal injuries increased by 12 per cent,” Taylor says.

London police are struggling to meet recruitment targets, a difficulty that Victoria Police is also facing.

“The Met is the largest police force in Europe. It delivers policing services to 9 million Londoners across 32 boroughs and to millions of commuters and visitors to the capital each year,” she says.

“The police in England and Wales is widely recognised as being severely under-resourced, and the Met police are understaffed and haven’t been able to meet recruitment targets.”

Tokyo’s safe streets

Tokyo is the most homogenous and safest of all the cities analysed.

Dr Masahiro Suzuki, a researcher at Central Queensland University Australia, says Tokyo is fairly safe compared to other major international cities, with very little street crime. Violence and muggings are relatively rare.

“Tokyo is a relatively homogenous city. Tokyo is obviously more culturally and ethnically diverse than any other city in Japan, but it is less so, way less so, than Melbourne,” he says.

He thinks this factor makes it easier for authorities to control crime.

“I think the homogeneity in Tokyo may contribute to exercising social control over people because they share the same values,” he says.

“On the other hand, I also think this homogeneity [in] Tokyo contributes to socially excluding people who do not comply with the social norms or rules.”

Japan has a notoriously tough criminal justice system that allows police to detain suspects for 23 days without charge, with limited access to legal advice.

However, Suzuki says that most Japanese people would be unaware of that fact.

As well, Japan has strong anti-association laws for the Yakuza organised crime gangs, including banning the leasing of homes to them, which go far beyond similar laws in Australia.

But the broader compliance with the law, Suzuki says, is also attributable to trust in police.

Tokyo has a community policing unit called the omawari-san. If you need directions, or have left your wallet on the train, they will help you.

“I think that’s contributed to promoting the legitimacy and trust toward Japanese police among Japanese citizens,” Suzuki says.

Suzuki says Japanese police are focused on preventing low-level crime, being a visible, but non-threatening presence in the community, and building trust. He says that there is a perception in Japan that law enforcement corruption is very low, despite the tough laws to deal with offenders.

The Economist study found that low corruption and good personal security were strongly correlated.

But one thing that The Age discovered across all the cities surveyed is that people universally believed crime was higher than it actually was in their cities.

A February 2020 study on social cohesion found that while fear of crime in the Victorian community was not widespread, where a fear of crime was present, providing residents with a range of options to address this worry in pro-social ways was likely to reduce worry.

“Simply put, when I think about safety, I think of the freedom from fear – to live, work and play without the perception of fear,” says Juma Assiago from the Urban Practices Branch at the United Nations.

He says that people often forget that safety is co-created, not given by the police or any single institution.

“The outlook of high crime in cities in most urbanised societies, such as in Latin America with gang violence … we now see with emerging acts of violent extremism and hate in Western societies that a decade ago considered themselves very safe.

“Safety is a common responsibility for all.”

In Melbourne, Denham and cohealth often speak to European and North American social work organisations about trends, law enforcement, what’s working and what’s not.

Last year, Australian Federal Police intercepted an illicit shipment containing 11.2 kilograms of fentanyl bound for Melbourne. But unlike other international cities, the drug hasn’t become the problem Australian authorities have dreaded.