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How the free crime check works

The free crime check summarises official, aggregated police data. It reports reported offences or recorded incidents. These figures describe reports recorded by police; they do not measure every offence that occurred.

Areas

  • Queensland results use current Queensland Police Service divisions. We spatially join each ABS 2021 Suburb and Locality to the QPS boundary with the largest polygon overlap, then assign that suburb's whole 2021 Census population to the division. A result should read, for example, “Rockhampton division (covers Rockhampton City, The Range, …)”. It is not a suburb-only total.
  • NSW and SA use the suburb labels in the official source.
  • Victoria uses the suburb/town and postcode table in the official CSA workbook.
  • Postcodes and populations come from ABS 2021 statistical geography. They may not match postal delivery boundaries or later population changes.

The QLD build records 633 split SALs in qld-ambiguous.json where the winning overlap was below 80% or the second-largest overlap was at least 10%. This is an audit trail; the largest-overlap assignment remains deterministic.

Fixed periods

Monthly sources compare the last complete 12 months with:

  1. the immediately previous 12 months; and
  2. the same 12 calendar months five years earlier.

The committed QLD period is September 2025–August 2026. NSW is July 2025–June 2026. Each includes a 36-month monthly series.

Annual sources use the latest June year ending period, the preceding June year ending period, and the June year ending period five years earlier. VIC and SA end June 2026 and include ten annual observations. Periods are fixed from the source end date; they are not selected to produce a preferred trend.

Categories and unavailable data

The categories are break-ins, vehicle theft, theft from vehicles, property damage, other theft, trespass and assault. CATEGORY-MAP.md gives the exact state mapping. Assault stays separate from the property block.

If a publisher does not identify a category consistently, the value is null and the state file explains why. It is never estimated. This applies to VIC trespass and, following SAPOL's 2025–26 classification change, SA vehicle theft, theft from vehicles, other theft and trespass.

Counts, changes and population

  • A displayed count below 5 reads “fewer than 5”.
  • A percentage change is shown only when both compared counts are at least 20.
  • A per-1,000 figure is computed as reported count ÷ ABS 2021 usual-resident population × 1,000 and is shown only where population is at least 500.
  • The shared stateAverage is calculated across the named areas in that state file using their mapped 2021 population. It is a comparison value for the covered dataset, not an estimate of unreported offending.

Updates and limitations

QPS's catalogue currently describes annual dataset updates, BOCSAR and CSA publish quarterly, SAPOL provides annual financial-year files, and ABS population is from the five-year Census. Source releases can revise earlier observations. The checksum and offence-vocabulary locks make a changed source stop the build for review.

Different police systems and offence classifications mean state figures should not be treated as perfectly equivalent. Boundary changes, SAL-to-division assignment, old Census population, unknown localities and source classification changes also affect comparisons. No wording should imply that an area is dangerous.

SAPOL's files also contain names outside South Australia and misspellings that are not an ABS 2021 South Australian SAL. They are excluded from the searchable SA area set rather than presented as false SA suburbs. area-exclusions.json records every excluded source label and postcode for audit.

Sources and licences