Well is it? ay ay? well?

:D

Sheffield is very safe yes, despite what *cough* certain people *cough* will tell you about how our council estates are full of thieving chavs who'd rob you blind as soon as give you the time of day..

Well it's the only city I have accidentally stabbed myself and needed hospital treatment (stitches) in.

So why have I ended up in casualty with a broken arm 3 times in 3 years?

Never my fault! honest

go get em red! :D

Is Aaarrrggghhh suffering some kind of midlife crisis jsut now :P

oops sorry - had to come back to answer the question - YES I think it is.

In spite of all the things we read about, when you consider that there are over half a million people living here in comparison with other cities, Sheffield is very safe. Some 45,000 of us are students, many living away from home for the first time. IMO it's remarkable how little trouble there is here.

MOD: Please stick to discussing the topic.

Is Sheffield still officially England's safest city?

Says who? And on what grounds?

Whatever ye say is rubbish

Originally posted by Aaarrrggghhh
Is Sheffield still officially England's safest city?

Says who? And on what grounds?

Says I.

On these grounds:

In Sheffield, there is trouble, but you must go looking for it.

In other cities, trouble comes looking for you!

It says 'officially', so spyro2000 must mean official statistics, like say, crime stats for the Sheffield city area, and it also says 'still' so presumably there was some sort of league table produced some time ago and Sheff came top?

But then there are problems with definitions of cities/metroplitan areas - I would guess cities like Ely or Ripon are quite safe. And there is recorded versus perceived crime and so on.

Originally posted by Bilge
But then there are problems with definitions of cities/metroplitan areas - I would guess cities like Ely or Ripon are quite safe. And there is recorded versus perceived crime and so on.

Ely? Ripon? Who defined those hamlets as cities :confused:

Ely, Cambs. (pop 14,500) awarded city status 1974 by Liz Windsor (though it's had a cathedral quite a while). Ripon, dunno - but another tiny place with an old cathedral. York is the same deal really, though a bit bigger obviously.

Lots of bigger places aren't really 'proper' cities either e.g. Wakefield, Salford, Wolves, they're just smaller bits of bigger cities.

So for the 'safest city' beauty contest you'd need to assemble all the data for comparable places.

Ofiicially or not ( i think it is still the safest) I certainly thik sheffield has the lowest fear of crime, certainly for me of any city i know.

I mean i've been mugged here - bu tthat was by a dark tramline i shouldn't have ogne down - and i still feel safer here than 'Great' Yarmouth, or even Norwich, my beloved home city.

I think its the mix of students and the community feel that i think still remains in most locals.

I was told by my insurance company when I reinsured my motorbike in Brighton and the premium halved that the BN1 and BN2 postcodes have the lowest vehicle crime surcharges in the country...

I suppose being a victim of road crime constitutes a threat to ones safety.

Sadly, I've no idea what the rest of the crime rates are like down here in relation to Sheffield. I tend to feel equally safe walking around in the both places.

Just less tired down here - fewer hills.

The problem with statements like "safest city" is that it depends on what you class as a city and what makes it safe or dangerous. You can't easily use crime statistics as you then have to make a judgement on which crimes don't affect your safety. The other main problem is that the stats tend to be grouped by police authority rather by city.

The latest figures that are available from the Home Office are for 2000. These show that South Yorkshire had 5.5 violent crimes per 1000 people whereas Nottinhamshire had 22, Liverpool had 14.4 and most parts of London are in the 20's and 30's.

The figures are much the same for sexual offences with Nottingam having 4 times the number of sexual offcences per head of population. In general terms, nottinham is half the size of Sheffield but twice as "dangerous". Although this data is 5 years old I would say that watching the news leads me to believe that this is probably still true.

The stats for Robbery also follow the same pattern with Sheffield much lower than other cities. When you come onto other offences such as burglary and car theft the stats then show that Sheffield not quite the lowest but still has half the rate of Manchester and Nottingham.

Nottm isn't really half the population of Sheff, it's about the same. It's just that Nottm is split into lots of silly little boroughs but which are effectively part of the city (Rushcliffe, Broxtowe etc) as well as Nottm 'City' itself [see the various 'how big is Sheff?' threads].

Manchester is much bigger. It has 10 differerent urban local authorities very close together, so in 'City of Manchester' you get to experience a lack of 'safety' (ie 'danger', however you might define that - eg car crime or burglary) due to unsavoury people from the other places (eg Trafford, Salford, Tameside) using it as their regional city centre too. I would say Sheff is populated by Sheff City-based people to a greater degree than Manchester is with 'City of Manchester'-based people, so we only get 'dangerous' Sheffielders and we don't get hordes of Donny, Rotherham , Barnsley and Chesterfield crims commuting in (though there are a few obviously).

Sheff is also very hilly which helps to stop people (crims as well as law-abiders) moving around as easily as in flatter places (like Mcr and Nottm).

Hello everyone

I am only 10 and my friends want to go out but i dont know how to use a bus :help: . What am i supposed to say to the bus driver?

The previous poster suggests that Nottingham is about the same size as Sheffield. This is not the case, but it is irrelevant to the stats since they compare the police areas. In both these cases these are well defined police authority areas where the populations are known. The areas in question have populations of 531,100 and 286,800 respectively. This makes Nottingham (from the point of view of crime statistics) 54% of the size of Sheffield. Clearly you can argue that some boroughs are included or excluded but then so are their crime figures.

The original post was asking about the safety of Sheffield. From the point of view of crime stats, Nottingham has four times the level of serious crimes comapared to Sheffield per head of population.

The safest city quote comes from comparing cities of similar size to Sheffield (e.g. Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham, etc). Stats are defined by policing districts (e.g Sheffield Central, Sheffield North, etc) rather than by police authorities, which tend to be defined by counties.

Home Office stats are available from much more recently than 2000 (see statistics.gov.uk). I'm not 100% sure if Sheffield is still the safest city (I would assume so), but Sheffield's figures are still very good compared to other cities of similar size. For example, there were no fatal shootings in Sheffield in 2004/05, but 8 in Nottingham. It's that sort of statistic that the safest city comparison was based on, rather than just picking whatever stats make the city look good.

Originally posted by AndrewC
and i still feel safer here than 'Great' Yarmouth, or even Norwich, my beloved home city.

I unfortunately took a holiday in Gt Yarmouth last year. I was terrified. Such blatant gangs of youths causing all kinds of havoc. I saw a couple of major scraps where the police piled in and dragged them off in a van.

My son hurt himself on a slide down there, I took him to the James Padgett hospital (lowestoft) and the first question they asked me was who my social worker was!

When I ask why would I have a social worker? The nurse said most parents of young kids who attended their a&e do!

Well my younger brother was murdered in Sheffield . So you can imagine the families views on the place.

Originally posted by petebarker
Well my younger brother was murdered in Sheffield . So you can imagine the families views on the place.

Sorry to hear it, thats terrible :(
Well I guess that no matter how "safe" a city seems, anything can happen to anyone anywhere at anytime. So maybe there shouldnt be an argument about where is the safest and where isnt safe.

:(

I would say that whether a city is 'safe' or not would also depend on what your lifestyle is. Stats on shootings interest me as I'm sure most shootings must be carried out as premeditated crimes. So if you don't have dealings with that sort of person then you're less likely to suffer that type of crime?

Where I grew up there was crime whatsoever, so Sheffield was going to be unsafe in any case compared to what I was used to. But if I wanted to go out for a drink I would have avoided the local market town like the plague because it was so violent with a terrible atmosphere in an evening, and I find this is true of a lot of smaller towns. Yet Sheffield has never really been like that until recently. I always felt perfectly safe going out for a beer and walking about on my own at night in Sheffield, which was a surprise.

I say recently because I've stopped going into the city centre much at night nowadays as it has felt more and more unsafe. I've also felt quite unsafe during the daytime, especially around the Moor as there seem to be more and more packs of chavs roaming about.