Crime rate Glasgow: what the police figures show

Glasgow's recorded crime rate was 849 crimes per 10,000 people in 2025/26, against 569 for Scotland as a whole. Only Dundee was higher. Crime in the city is far below where it was in the 1990s, but it went up 5% last year.

Glasgow against the rest of Scotland

Police in Glasgow City recorded 55,193 crimes in the year to March 2026. Per head, that's about 1.5 times Scotland's rate. Across Scotland there were 315,357, the most since 2014/15.

Crime stats Glasgow by type

The official figures sort crimes into five groups. Glasgow is above the Scottish rate in every one of them, but by very different amounts.

Theft and other dishonesty is the biggest group, 20,167 crimes. Nearly half of that is shoplifting, 9,722 cases, which I've looked at in shoplifting hits a record high. There were also 839 housebreakings and 2,438 frauds.

Violence that isn't sexual came to 12,567 crimes. Most were common assaults (10,688). There were 555 serious assaults or attempted murders, 306 robberies and 13 murders or culpable homicides.

Crimes against society run at nearly twice the Scottish rate. These are mostly crimes the police find themselves, like carrying drugs (4,823) or a weapon, rather than crimes a victim reports. So the count reflects how much proactive policing there is as well as how much crime.

Sexual crimes came to 2,454. In the year to June 2026 they rose from 2,271 to 2,480, up 9%, the same rise as Scotland. I went through what is behind the recent rise, and what the records can and can't tell us, in Glasgow sex crimes went up 28%.

Crime in Glasgow by year

In 1996/97 the city recorded 98,626 crimes, a rate of 1,647 per 10,000. Since then the number has fallen by 44%. Most of that fall came before 2016/17. The rate in 2025/26 was higher than in any of the four years before it.

What the rate leaves out

• •It's per resident. Lots of people from the surrounding councils work, shop and go out in Glasgow, so crimes involving visitors still count against the city's own population.
• •It only counts crime the police recorded. Plenty is never reported.
• •Crimes and offences are counted separately. On top of the crimes, Glasgow police recorded 33,940 offences in 2025/26, things like threatening behaviour, drink driving and speeding. That's 522 per 10,000, against 347 for Scotland.
• •Recording changes. Every police division was on one national recording system by April 2024, and new guidance on evidence in domestic abuse cases came in the same month. Both can affect comparisons with earlier years.

The local police reports

Police Scotland reports on Glasgow's local policing plan every quarter to the Safe Glasgow Partnership, and the papers are public on the council's committee website. They come out sooner than the official statistics but use police counts. The report for April to December 2024, for example, showed recorded rapes up from 254 to 357 on the same months a year earlier.