Crime rates in Purley

The safest and worst parts of Purley

Neighbourhoods inside Purley, by recorded crimes per 1,000 residents in the year to July 2026, shaded against the England and Wales average. Names are the House of Commons Library's, which are chosen to be the ones local people use.

Neighbourhoods here are Middle Layer Super Output Areas of around 7,000 residents. Each figure is an average over the whole neighbourhood, and the ones holding a town centre run high wherever daily visitors outnumber residents. How the figures work explains why these areas are used rather than electoral wards.

By type of offence

Recorded offences in the 12 months to July 2026, with the change on the 12 months before.

Home Office recorded crime, data.police.uk. Rates use ONS mid-2024 population estimates (20,131 residents). Categories are the Home Office crime types as published; they are not comparable with court or conviction figures.

What happened to those crimes

Police recorded 1,475 offences other than anti-social behaviour in Purley in the year to July 2026. By the time this data was published, about 42% had been closed with no suspect identified and 29% closed because a prosecution was not possible or not pursued. Around 8% had led to a charge, caution or other formal action, and 21% were still open.

The widest shortfall against the national picture is for shoplifting: 9.4% of cases here ended in a charge or other formal action, against 25.9% across England and Wales.

Outcomes describe where each investigation stood when the data was published, so recent offences are naturally still open and the closed shares will edge up as cases conclude. Anti-social behaviour is left out entirely: police record no outcomes for it, and counting it would quietly flatter every percentage here. "Formal action" spans charges, summonses, cautions, penalty notices and community resolutions.

Outcomes by offence in Purley

The share of cases ending in a charge, caution or other formal action, against the same figure for England and Wales. Offences with fewer than 30 recorded cases here are left out: a percentage of twelve cases moves several points on one decision.

"Charged or dealt with" counts every outcome that is a formal action: charged, summonsed, cautioned, penalty notice, community resolution. Anti-social behaviour is excluded from both columns because it carries no outcome by design. A low rate is not necessarily a failing of the force here: some offences are far harder to detect anywhere, which is why every row is shown against the national figure for the same offence rather than against the other rows.

Over time

Recorded crime in Purley peaked at 2,117 offences in 2011; the latest 12 months, at 1,776, are about 16% below that peak. That works out at roughly 5 a day.

Download every month as CSV, including which months each force filed.

Streets and the crime map

The named streets with the most recorded offences in the year to July 2026, beside every mapped location in Purley.

Compared with nearby areas

Against the rest of the country

In the national table, where 1st is the highest recorded crime rate, Purley was 301st of 706 in December 2010 and is 465th of 929 today. It has moved 164 places away from the top: recorded crime here has fallen relative to the rest of the country.

Time of year

Recorded crime here peaks in July, about 19% above its quietest month, February.

Crime in context

What deprivation would predict

Across every English district, deprivation explains much of the difference in recorded crime rates. On that relationship alone, Purley's level of deprivation would predict a rate of about 83 per 1,000. It records 88.2, close to what the pattern would suggest.

How tightly packed it is

5,180 people per square kilometre, across 4 km². England and Wales averages about 400 people per square kilometre. Density is the usual explanation for a high position in the national crime table: a rate divides the crime of everyone who passes through by the number who sleep there.

What a home costs

The median home sold in Purley in 2025 went for £510,000, across 315 sales, down 3.8% on 2024.

Officers to record it

Metropolitan Police Service had 31,495 full-time equivalent officers as at 31 March 2026, 3.47 per 1,000 residents, above the England and Wales figure of 2.42. That is 4% above its low point of 30,390 in 2018. Recorded crime partly measures how much policing there is to record it, so a change in officer numbers moves the figures on this page even when nothing else does.

Officer numbers are full-time equivalents from the Home Office police workforce return, counted across the whole force area. Nothing in this section causes anything on this page: a correlation is not a cause.

Stop and search

Metropolitan Police Service carried out 133,879 stop and searches in the 12 months to July 2026, 14.8 per 1,000 people in the force area. 33.5% ended in an arrest or another sanction, against 28.9% across England and Wales. The rest found nothing.

Stop and search is recorded for the whole force area rather than by town, so it is set out in full on the Metropolitan Police Service page.

Every force compared, and how searches break down by the ethnicity officers recorded, is on stop and search by ethnicity.

Who oversees policing in Purley

Policing in Purley is overseen by the Mayor of London, who holds the police and crime commissioner's powers here. Sadiq Khan (Labour) won that election in May 2024. Since that election, recorded crime here is up 8.2% (the latest 12 months of data against the 12 months up to the election).

Councils in England and Wales have no policing powers. The police force covering an area is answerable to a directly elected commissioner, or to the combined authority mayor where that office has taken the role on. The coloured strip under the trend chart shows these terms against the crime line.

The change column reports what recorded crime did across each term, because it is the first thing a reader wants from this table. It is what happened, not what the officeholder caused: recorded crime moves with reporting rules, how a force records what is reported, national policy and a pandemic, and those effects are far larger than anything one commissioner does in four years. The terms spanning 2020 and 2021 in particular contain the lockdowns, which cut recorded crime everywhere and handed the following term the rebound.

These are election results, not terms of office: commissioners resign, die and are disqualified mid-term, and by-elections between the scheduled polls are listed here only where one has been held. For who holds the office today, the force's own website is the authority. The last column compares recorded crime in the 12 months ending at the handover (or the latest data) with the 12 months ending at the election itself; where a monthly return is missing, the window slides by up to four months to the nearest complete one. A dash means the term ran under a year or no complete window exists near it.

Questions

Is Purley safe?

In the year to July 2026, the recorded crime rate in Purley was 88.2 per 1,000 residents. That is close to the England and Wales average. A recorded crime rate measures what the police recorded, across a whole town. It says nothing about any particular street, and areas with busy town centres, shopping areas or nightlife record more crime per resident because far more people are present than live there.

Is crime in Purley going up or down?

In Purley, the latest 12 months are 3.3% lower than the 12 before. Over the full series, recorded crime here peaked at 2,117 offences in 2011 and the current total is about 16% below it.

What is the most common crime in Purley?

The most commonly recorded offence in Purley is violence and sexual offences, with 530 offences in the 12 months to July 2026 (30% of all recorded crime). The next most common is anti-social behaviour, with 301.

Where does this come from?

Police recorded crime open data, published at data.police.uk by the Home Office under the Open Government Licence. It covers offences the police recorded, which is not the same as offences committed: crimes that are never reported never appear. Rates use ONS mid-2024 population estimates. How the figures work sets out the calculation, the reporting lag and every known gap.