November 21, 2025 | Incident and Crime Statistics , Crime Statistics
Request Number: FOI/15732
Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Crime Statistics
Subject: Crime Statistics for Belfast City Centre
Request and Answer:
Your request for information has now been considered and we are not obliged to supply the information you have requested.
Question 1
Would it therefore be possible for you to provide me with crime statistics for Belfast city centre over the course of the last five years?
Question 2
And please include a breakdown of the type of crime – i.e. anti-social behaviour, violence and sexual offences, shoplifting, drugs offences and so on?
Clarification Sought
Could you advise what you classify as Belfast City Centre? Can you provide post codes, addresses or even a map to indicate the area within which we need to search?
Clarification received
Could we isolate the search please to all BT1 and BT2 postcodes?
Answer
Section 17(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires the Police Service of Northern Ireland, when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt) to provide the applicant with a notice which:
(a) states the fact,
(b) specifies the exemption in question and
(c) states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies.
The following exemption has been applied:
Section 21 - Information Reasonably Accessible by Other Means
The information you request may be located on the Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency (NISRA) Data Portal, which provides financial year information on the number of recorded crimes for a range of geographies, broken down by crime type. The smallest geography available is Ward. For Belfast there is a ward called ‘Central’, you should check that it covers the area that you are interested in. There may be other wards that would be of interest to you.
This data table can be found here: https://data.nisra.gov.uk/table/PRCWARD
Additionally, you may be interested in the Police.uk crime map, which provides monthly street level information on crime and Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB). The map groups crime and Anti-Social Behaviour data into grey ‘hot spots’. As you zoom in on the map, these hot spots become more precise. By hovering your mouse over these you will be given figures for crime and Anti-Social Behaviour in the right hand pane. Data is displayed by month for the previous 36 months. Older data is available through the Police.uk data archive.
The most relevant crime map zone can be found here:
https://www.police.uk/pu/your-area/police-service-of-northern-ireland/lisburn-road/?yourlocalpolicingteam=about-us&tab=crimemap