Ask anyone in Cairns whether crime has got worse and you’ll get the same weary answer: obviously it has. Break-ins, stolen cars and a creeping sense the place has changed. The stock reassurance from officialdom is that it only feels worse than it is. It doesn’t — the Queensland Police numbers back the residents, not the reassurance.
Start with the top line. Total recorded offences in the Cairns council area sat flat or drifted gently for a generation — roughly 18,000 to 25,000 a year right through the 2000s and 2010s. Then the floor gave way. In 2025 Cairns logged 34,623 offences, the highest tally on record and up 36% on 2019. Crime here isn’t creeping up. It has stepped up — and it happened fast.
Pull that total apart and one number does most of the damage. For two decades assaults in Cairns barely twitched, sitting between 997 and around 1,400 a year, every year from 2001 through to 2019. Then from 2020 the line went vertical: 3,395 by 2022 and 4,004 by 2025 — 2.9× the 2019 figure and the most ever recorded. A number that hadn’t moved in twenty years nearly tripled in five.
Two flat decades, then a wall. Assault didn’t drift up — it stepped up and stayed there. Source: Queensland Police Service.
And this is the part that should unsettle people most. The category tearing upward isn’t shoplifting or fraud — it’s assault: violence, one person against another. Break-ins and car theft spiked hard too at the 2022 peak, roughly doubling on their 2019 levels, but property crime at least eased back afterwards. Assault never did. It’s the difference between a statistic you read about and one you feel walking to your car at night.
Broadly flat for years then a violent spike in the 2022 surge — 4,826 break-ins that year, the most on record. Source: Queensland Police Service.
The clearest long-run climb of any category — vehicle theft is up more than threefold since 2001, peaking at 1,506 in 2022. Source: Queensland Police Service.
Cairns kept saying it was getting worse. The data doesn’t just nod along — it shows one of the sharpest local crime surges anywhere in the state.
Nor is it a one-year scare that quietly corrected. Every year since 2021 has set a new high for assault in Cairns and 2025 was the worst of the lot. Whatever changed here around 2020 didn’t blow through and pass — it hardened into the new normal, a plateau at a level the city had never seen. The old baseline of about 1,198 assaults a year now looks like a different town.
If you live here or you’re weighing up a move, the number that matters is the local one. Check any address on KnowYourBlock and you’ll see the crime read for that part of Cairns alongside its flood, bushfire, zoning and school-catchment picture — or dig into the full trend on the Cairns crime page.