Alice Springs ranked in top 20 world’s most dangerous cities
Alice Springs has been ranked the 18th most dangerous city in the world in a mid-2024 crime index. Picture: Pema Tamang Pakhrin
Alice Springs ranked in top 20 world’s most dangerous cities according to mid-2024 crime index, Canberra safest in Australia.
One Australian city has joined some of the most violent and frightening areas across the globe after being included in the world’s top 20 most dangerous places, a result locals are not surprised by.
An Australian city has been listed among the world’s most dangerous places, ranking alongside Cape Town in South Africa and the Mexican border city of Tijuana.
Alice Springs was ranked the 18th most dangerous city in the world in the mid-2024 Crime Index by City, published by the crowdsourced data website Numbeo.
Numbeo gave Alice Springs a crime rating of 72.1 in the mid-2024 list – equal to the Mexican city of Tijuana, which currently has a murder rate of 91.7 people per 100,000. Ranked only slightly worse was Cape Town, with a crime rate of 73.8
The outback centre is the first Australian city to make it into the top 20 of the list, which provides crime and safety ratings to 311 cities.
Seven other Australian cities were listed on the crime index, with the next highest being the Gold Coast at 139 (with a crime score of 46.9) and Canberra ranking lowest at 266 (with a crime score of 26.4).
Alice Springs business owner Darren Clark, who runs the Action for Alice 2020 Facebook page which tracks crime in the central Australian city, said the ranking was “an indication of how bad the situation is”.
“Put simply people are not safe locked in their own homes… our government has let it go way to far,” Mr Clark said.
The data website claims scores between 60 and 80 are considered “high”, with those above 80 being considered “very high”.
South Africa dominated the latest list, with five of the top seven most dangerous cities including Pietermaritzburg and Pretoria – which topped the list with crime indexes of 82.5 and 81.9 respectively.
The Venezuelan capital of Caracas came third at 81.7, just ahead of Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, which scored 80.9, and Johannesburg with 80.8.
The rest of the top 10 were Durban and Port Elizabeth, both in South Africa, the Brazilian cities of Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, as well as the American city of Memphis, Tennessee.
South African cities dominated the top 20 most dangerous cities with five of the top seven spots. Picture: Numbeo
The mid-2024 list was published just days before a group of off-duty police officers were allegedly surrounded and attacked in Alice Springs – leading to the husband and father of two of the officers to describe the city as a “horrid war zone” that is “too dangerous” for fresh police recruits like his daughter.
According to Numbeo, the crime index is an “estimation of the overall level of crime in a given city”, which is “based on user-contributed data and perceptions”.
“The index serves as a comparative tool to assess the relative safety of different cities or countries, helping individuals make informed decisions and understand the crime landscape in specific locations,” Numbeo says.
The limitations of the index are highlighted by the list of the 10 most dangerous cities by murder rate, compiled by Statistica.
Based on the number of murders per 100,000 inhabitants, the world’s most dangerous city is Colima, Mexico, which has a murder rate of 140.32 per 100,000.
The list contains six other Mexican cities, Ciudad Obregon, Zamora, Manzanillo, Tijuana, Zacatecas, and Ciudad Juarez – which have murder rates ranging from 117.83 to 77.43. The three additional cities are Portu-au-Prince in Haiti (117.24), Guayaquil in Ecuador (88.82), and Mandela Bay in South Africa (78.33).
In 2023, the Northern Territory as a whole had a homicide rate of just 9.3 per 100,000.
