im looking for local crime rates in sheff how do i find out

The Office of National Statistics has regional figures, not sure about individual towns and cities.

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/

Is a good place to start.

Does anyone know where the information came from which claimed that Sheffield was the safest city in Britain.
I suspect it's one of those baseless statements put out by an imaginative PR guy which gets repeated ad nauseam.And nobody ever checks the source.
The current National Crime Stats do not compare individual cities.
The latest wheeze is the National Crime Survey which is based on peoples perception of crime rather than actual reported crime.
Not sure if the survey asks "Have you ever been stabbed to death?"

The "safest city" claim was probably true a couple of years ago, and it only took into account the other major cities in the UK. I doubt that it's still the case though.

To check the crime rate just go round and see how many cars have steering locks, how many alarms are constantly going off all day and how often muggings etc are mentioned in the paper for that area. Simple lol.

You can check car theft and burglary figures here.

www.upmystreet.com

I would suggest that somewhere like Ely or Wells has a lower crime rate than Sheffield.

But you can check sheffield's crime rate against national average and a wealth of other stats at the British Crime Survey. I would say the origin of the "sheffield saftes city" claim is here it seems, so it was apparently true in 2000 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/uk/839096.stm

other links:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/union/susoc/cssa/information/safestcity.htm

http://www.crimestatistics.org.uk/tool/default.asp?region=7&force=24&cdrp=239&l1=0&l2=0&l3=0&sub=0&v=21

http://www.crimestatistics.org.uk/output/Page54.asp

Thanks to phanerothyme for providing the sources of the "Safer
City" claim.
As -I am sure we all suspected -the original claim dates back over four years and is qualified as "safest of the big cities".
The latest available Crime Survey based on 2003 information makes less happy reading - and following the spate of shootings and stabbings in 2004 -the current picture isn't likely to feature in the tourist brochure.
Makes you wonder if the Council and its business pals are on the
right track with the "24 hour city"strategy.Perhaps we should be
creating a few duck ponds , bramble paths and leafy meadows
instead of atriums and concreted regenerational projects.
A big happy village isn't as daft as it seems - my old pal my old beauty.