Alice Springs has been listed among the world’s most dangerous places, ranking alongside Mexico’s most violent city, Tijuana, and Cape Town in South Africa.
The Northern Territory town was ranked the 18th most dangerous city in the world in the mid-2024 Crime Index by City, published by data website, Numbeo.
It gave Alice Springs a crime rating of 72.1 – equal to Tijuana, home to more than 2,000 murders per year on average between 2019 and 2023. The Mexican city currently has a murder rate of 91.7 people per 100,000, while the entire Northern Territory had a 2023 homicide rate of just 9.3 per 100,000.
It’s the first time an Australian ‘city’ has made the list’s top 20. Seven other Australian locations were also listed – with Gold Coast scoring a 46.9 and Canberra ranking lowest at 26.4 on the crime score ratings.
Numbeo says the crime index is an “estimation of the overall level of crime in a given city…based on user-contributed data and perceptions”.
In a live TV interview this morning, Alice Springs Mayor, Matt Paterson said extra police resources were part of the solution to the local crime problem.
“I say that we need extra police and people get all worked up and say, ‘you’re not going to police your way out of this’. Well, quite frankly, when we have extra police here we see proactive policing, a visual presence of surveillance and it does make a difference.
“It’s not ‘policing your way out of it’, it’s showing the community ‘you’re safe’. We know we don’t have enough police. I take my hat off to the police on the ground here every day, they work incredibly hard – a job I couldn’t do.
“But we certainly need more of them and we certainly need to not just focus on alcohol being the issue in Alice Springs. There’s alcohol and there’s youth crime in Alice Springs and we need to address both of those things together.
View the complete crime index list here.
