Ask anyone who’s house-hunted around Brisbane and they’ll have a theory about which suburbs to avoid. Usually it’s secondhand — something a mate said at a barbecue, or a photo of a smashed car window doing the rounds on a local Facebook group. I got tired of guessing and went to the source: five years of Queensland Police crime data. The first catch is that the police don’t publish it street by street or even suburb by suburb — crime is counted by council area. So that’s the unit we can actually compare and I’ve taken the eight councils that make up greater Brisbane and its immediate neighbours.
Here’s the twist most people get wrong. Brisbane City records more of everything — more offences, more cars pinched, more break-ins — and yet per head of population it doesn’t top the list. Two smaller neighbours do. Raw counts just measure how big a council is; measure the rate instead — offences per 100,000 residents — and a quiet shire and a sprawling city finally line up on the same footing. Here it is, over the year to Jun 2026.
- 1Logan12,286per 100k
- 2Ipswich10,927per 100k
- 3Brisbane10,233per 100k
- 4Gold Coast9,884per 100k
- 5Moreton Bay8,563per 100k
- 6Redland6,689per 100k
- 7Sunshine Coast6,038per 100k
- 8Noosa5,898per 100k
Logan lands on top at 12,286 per 100k — roughly 2.1 times Noosa at the bottom. That won’t shock anyone who’s read a tabloid headline in the last decade. What gets said far less often is that Ipswich and Brisbane itself aren’t far behind and the whole pack sits in the same broad band. This isn’t a story about one lawless outlier and seven leafy havens.
Logan wears the region’s reputation and the data doesn’t entirely let it off the hook — but the gap to everyone else is smaller than the headlines would have you believe.
It’s also worth being clear about what “crime” even means here. Across the eight councils, about 48% of reported offences are property crime — cars, break-ins, things walking off the back deck — not violence. The picture that word tends to conjure is rarely what the numbers are actually describing.
A single year is easy to cherry-pick, so here’s the long view. Logan’s reported offences have been climbing over the past year against the one before — but month to month the line is jumpy and the shape over years is the part worth trusting.
And here’s a projection I’ll happily be held to. Logan wears the crown today, but it’s the only one of the big three standing still — it’s bounced around the same rate for years. Brisbane is the one quietly climbing, adding the thick end of 500 offences per 100k in the last year alone while Logan went nowhere. Draw both lines out and they cross somewhere around the end of the decade. The natural order of the southeast, in other words, is on track to flip. Which leaves SEQ with a genuinely cursed piece of advice: in a few years’ time, the smart move to escape the crime will be to get out of Brisbane and into Logan for a bit of peace and quiet. Buy in Logan now. Beat the rush.
Now the bit I have to say and genuinely mean: a council-wide rate is a blunt instrument. Crime clusters — a few streets, a few hours, a handful of repeat spots — and a high average doesn’t make a whole postcode dangerous any more than a low one makes it safe. How willing people are to report also varies from place to place. Treat this as a starting point for better questions, not a verdict on a suburb.
If you’re weighing up a specific place, the number for the whole council is far too coarse to lean on. Search the address on KnowYourBlock and you’ll get the crime read for that pocket, next to its flood, bushfire, zoning and school-catchment picture — the stuff you actually want to know before you bid.