Australian town ranked one of the world's most dangerous places to live
Alice Springs has been listed as one of the world's most dangerous cities, sharing the spotlight with crime-heavy locales like Cape Town and Tijuana.
According to the mid-2024 Crime Index by City, published by the crowdsourced data platform Numbeo, Alice Springs was ranked 18th, making it the first Australian city to enter the top 20.
The city was given a crime rating of 72.1, on par with Tijuana, where the murder rate stands at a staggering 91.7 per 100,000 people. Cape Town's crime rate was slightly higher at 73.8.
Watch what happened when Rebel News reporter Avi Yemini confronted the youth gangs terrorising the outback town:
Darren Clark, a local business owner and administrator of the Action for Alice 2020 Facebook page, highlighted the gravity of the situation.
"Put simply, people are not safe locked in their own homes... our government has let it go way too far," he said, underscoring the severity of the crime wave affecting the area.
Resident of Alice Springs
— Action for Alice 2020 (@actionforalice) July 22, 2024
Friday 19th July Bloomfield St @130am.
30 plus people aged from 18 to 30 fighting on Bloomfield at 130 to 2am. Bashing each other in the streets, smashing bottles and screaming. From what it looked like, they had stolen a Navara driving around… pic.twitter.com/VG8sSkeUF0
Numbeo’s ratings categorise scores between 60 and 80 as “high”, and those above 80 as “very high”. Besides Alice Springs, seven other Australian cities made it to the crime index, with the Gold Coast ranked 139th and Canberra the lowest at 266th.
South Africa dominated the list, with five of the top seven most dangerous cities including Pietermaritzburg and Pretoria, which led with crime scores of 82.5 and 81.9, respectively. Other cities in the top 10 included Caracas in Venezuela, Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, and Johannesburg.
The index's release coincided with an incident in Alice Springs where off-duty police officers were allegedly attacked, prompting the family of two officers to describe the city as a “horrid war zone”.
Numbeo's crime index, based on user-contributed data, serves as a comparative tool to gauge the relative safety of cities worldwide. However, another list by Statistica, focused on murder rates, placed Colima, Mexico at the top, highlighting different facets of global crime data.
