If you’re planning to move to Europe, there’s something the relocation industry is trying to hide from you — and after nine years living here, I’m going to tell you anyway. It is about crime in Europe.
Other voices sell you on the low crime rates of Europe, the charming old towns, and a stress-free lifestyle. And honestly, at least in the part of quality of life, they are right — it is really nice here. But things have changed since I arrived.
You need to hear the truth. In some of the most desired expat destinations, crime is soaring. I’m not just talking about pickpockets targeting tourists. I’m talking about a country where an unbelievable 136 thefts and nine armed robberies happen every single day. I’m talking about nations facing extreme spikes in robbery and even official warnings of a “narco-state” right in the heart of the continent.
This article breaks down nine European countries where crime is surging right now, ranked from moderate increases to the most alarming situations.
The Criteria When Talking About Crime in Europe
I need to be clear about the method before showing you the ranking, because if you rank total crime only, you are blind to the changes that are happening right now. We care more about the speed of change in the last 12 to 24 months than about old statistics.
We tracked year-over-year jumps in homicide, gun attacks, organized theft, and fraud — and we also checked whether the rise hits the exact cities expats pick first. National averages can fool you. In many European countries, crime is extremely concentrated in just a few cities.
Germany is a clean example: total crime dropped 5.6% to about 5.5 million cases in 2025, but murder still rose 8.4%. And no, this is not panic content or fear-baiting. Europe is still much safer than the US, for example — the US homicide rate is about 6 per 100,000, while Belgium, even with its current spike, is around 1.38. But if a city trend turns bad fast, that still matters for your move.
We start with moderate warning signs, then the numbers get much worse.
9th Place: The Netherlands
This one catches people off guard because they imagine clean streets, bikes everywhere, tidy rules. But the newer numbers tell a less calm story in the big cities.
The number of incidents barely moved in 2025 — 806,000 versus 805,000 in 2024 — so if you only read that line, you might think things are stable. But a CBS review confirmed the long decline from 2011 to 2018 has ended, and now the pattern looks flat at best and worse in some crime types.
Drug crime is the clearest warning sign. In 2025, drug offenses climbed to 15,369 cases — a 12-year high and nearly 1,000 more than the 14,390 cases recorded in 2024, which had already been a ten-year high. Weapons crime points the same way. In 2024, crimes involving weapons were 24% above 2014 levels, and gun-related incidents kept rising into 2025.
Crime is highly concentrated in the most well-known cities. Amsterdam had more than 81,000 incidents with almost 87 crimes per 1,000 residents. But Rotterdam matters even more than many expats think, because Rotterdam is home to the biggest port in Europe — and that changes everything.
As a transit point for cocaine from South America and a leading producer of synthetic drugs, organized crime there is not just in the background. And this is where people get fooled by the Dutch image. The front end looks fine because coffeeshops can sell cannabis, but the supply behind that legal storefront is often criminal.
So the public face looks soft and controlled, while the supply chain gives criminal groups years of room to grow, move money, and build networks. Groups like the Mocro Maffia are part of a huge criminal machine, tied heavily to drug trafficking through Rotterdam.
However, all this affects mostly major cities like Amsterdam or Rotterdam. In the east of the Netherlands there are plenty of safe, scenic Dutch cities.
8th Place: Germany
This one fools people because the top-line number looks better at first glance. Total recorded crime fell 5.6% in 2025, so if you stop at this number, Germany looks good. But when you look at the crimes that hit hardest, the picture changes fast.
Murders climbed 8.4%, sexual offenses jumped 10.3% — and that split is what matters here. So the obvious question is: how can crime fall while some of the worst categories rise?
Germany changed the rules. Anti-cannabis laws were no longer enforced from 2024, so police registered fewer cannabis cases as crime, causing the total crime count to drop even if day-to-day safety did not improve. That’s why this country matters for this ranking. It teaches you that a lower statistic sometimes just means the state counts fewer things than it counted before.
Police recorded more than 217,000 acts of violence in 2024 — the highest total since 2007. Offenses tied to new psychoactive substances jumped 25.5%, which tells you people didn’t stop using drugs, they just shifted to other substances.
Berlin recorded a record number of shots fired in 2025, and the murder rate kept moving up. Experts and politicians described parts of the city as a “Wild West atmosphere,” tied to clan conflict, turf battles, and drug trafficking.
If you’re not careful, you look just at rent price tags, then rent in a district with serious violence clusters. Some expats treat Germany like the gold standard in Europe because the trains work and the healthcare system is decent. But when the government changes how crime is counted while also putting the police force under pressure, we should ask questions.
If total crime falls while murder rises, you need to ask whether the threat changed, whether reporting changed, or whether the law changed what police count. In Germany, the law changed part of the count — and that masks a worse trend in the crimes most people care about.
There are some categories moving down and some parts of Germany that are islands of tranquility, so it is not chaos everywhere. But youth crime moved in the wrong direction too, with homicides involving non-German youth doubling since 2021.
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7th Place: Italy
This one might surprise some, because Italy is still a very safe country overall. Italy’s homicide rate is around 0.51 per 100,000 — low by European standards — but the surge here hits property crime, and that kind of crime wears you down slowly. It steals your phone, your wallet, your time with police reports, and then your peace of mind goes with it.
Milan carries the highest overall crime rate among major Italian cities at 6,952 cases per 100,000 residents, and it also leads the country in pickpocketing with more than 900 reports per 100,000. Rome logged 2,008 street robberies, up 22%. Florence jumped even faster, with 11,051 thefts, up 48% in one year.
Nationally, burglaries rose by 4.9 percentage points and vehicle thefts by 2.3 percentage points, while overall crime climbed 1.7% in 2024. Tourism adds fuel to it because the places people love most are also the places that pull the biggest crowds.
Walking everywhere sounds great — but then you get there, and the same busy streets that looked charming in photos give pickpockets and phone snatchers a steady stream of targets.
There is also an issue with cybercrime and online fraud that you should know about, because these crimes don’t grow in a vacuum. Organized crime groups still shape parts of the economy and logistics, with reports tying 22% of Italian citizens and 14.6% of GDP to those networks. You may never see those groups directly. But drug-related crime rose 3.9 percentage points and intentional injuries climbed 5.8% — that tells you the street-level theft problem lives inside a wider criminal system.
Italy is a great country — one of our favourites — but you must factor in theft risk in major cities. The postcard cities cost more and expose you more: a bad deal if safety is one of your priorities.
6th Place: Ireland
Crime in Ireland is already causing some social tensions. From the year ending Q1 2022 to the year ending Q1 2025, theft and related offenses jumped 46%, reaching 74,102 recorded incidents. Such a rise is not to be ignored by someone using public transit or carrying a work laptop every day.
The problem moved beyond simple grab-and-run theft. Robbery, extortion, and hijacking climbed from 1,833 incidents to 2,281 over the same period — a 24% rise — which points to more violent property crime. Weapons and explosive offenses also rose, up 14%. Then you add attempts, threats to murder, assaults, and harassment, which increased from 22,106 to 24,690, a 12% rise.
So the story in Ireland is not just that more things are getting stolen — it is that you might get hurt during the process.
Most of this violence is not spread evenly across the country. Dublin carries a lot of it, which makes things worse because that is where many new arrivals start. There, theft, robbery, and public order problems run higher than in the rest of Ireland.
There is also a deeper money problem behind the crime rise. Ireland’s housing crisis and cost-of-living strain have put a lot of pressure on daily life, and that kind of stress opens the door for recruitment, theft, and organized resale crime. That changes the feel of the problem — some of the crime is planned, repeated, and tied to larger groups, not just random bad luck.
To make things worse, there are fewer police officers in Ireland today than 15 years ago — despite the population increasing by 17% in the same period. More people, less police. It looks like a serious issue with priorities.
5th Place: Greece
On top of the statistics for Greece, there is a personal story worth sharing. Greek police records show an average of 136 thefts and burglaries per day, plus nine armed robberies, plus other crimes on top of that.
The wider number is hard to ignore. Greece has the highest share of residents in the EU reporting personal exposure to crime, violence, or vandalism in their area, at 20.9%. If one in five people tell survey researchers they feel this close to crime where they live, you should read Athens very differently from the way travel marketing presents it.
In the first five months of 2025, Attica — which includes Athens — accounted for 62% of all burglaries in the country and 25% of all homicides. So if Athens is on your shortlist, you are not buying into a normal national risk. You are stepping into the exact region where a big share of the crime is packed together.
Tourism adds fuel because crowds of visitors turn into a large pool of targets. And the people behind the crime are not all from one source. 34% of all crime is committed by non-domestic gangs. Albanian groups make up 70% of foreign criminal involvement, while Georgian groups account for 10%.
A huge part of criminal activity is carried out by minors and youth gangs — harder to track, even harder to curb. There are also issues with scams targeting elderly people, which jumped 50% compared to the previous year.
On the bright side, Greece has some impressive tax incentives for expats — among the best in Europe.
4th Place: France
A lot of people still hear “France” and think the risk starts and ends with pickpockets in Paris. But the 2025 data points to a broader rise across violence and theft, and the national picture looks worse than a decade ago.
France holds 1st place in the 2025 Numbeo crime index, with a score of 55.4, and official data for 2025 shows physical violence up 5% from the year before. The country had 897 homicides in a single year — in absolute numbers, more than any other country in Europe except Russia and Ukraine.
France moved from 1.21 homicides per 100,000 people in 2020 to 1.5 in 2023, and 2025 kept the count moving in the wrong direction. Marseille is a center for drug-war violence, with 19 shootings linked to rival cartels in 2025, while Grenoble and northern Paris — especially Seine-Saint-Denis — have serious issues too.
The deeper driver is drug trafficking, and France has been dealing with the violent side of that trade for years. Police presence matters, but it does not erase the pipeline that feeds these groups. The poorer suburban banlieues give criminal networks a steady pool for recruitment. Dense city life then adds more targets, more movement, and more chances for theft and street violence to keep spreading inside the same metro areas.
For you as an expat, this changes the trade-off. You may want France for healthcare, trains, culture, and a high human development index — and those things are real. But while small and medium cities like Annecy remain remarkably safe, larger French cities have a completely different outlook.
3rd Place: United Kingdom
The United Kingdom takes third place because of knife attacks, street fights, late-night trouble near train stations, and the soaring numbers of fraud.
For the year ending March 2025, the Crime Survey for England and Wales recorded about 9.4 million incidents, up 7% from 8.8 million a year earlier. Fraud drove much of that rise — it climbed 31% to about 4.2 million incidents, the highest level recorded since this category started.
There is a strange split in the robbery numbers worth catching, because this is where many expats read the UK wrong. Overall robbery fell 3%, with 78,804 police-recorded offenses. But robbery of business property jumped 50%. Criminals did not back off — they shifted targets.
One line did improve in the violence data: police-recorded knife crime in England and Wales fell 8.3%. But it is such a small drop that the overall numbers remain huge. Knife-enabled offenses remain about 54% higher than they were ten years ago, so the small drop does not erase the larger safety deficit.
Digital fraud groups in the UK got much better at what they do. That means safety in the UK now includes your passwords, your banking habits, your SIM card, and the way you verify landlords or service providers. If you only think about street awareness, you are screening the country with an outdated checklist.
The place matters a lot. London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Bradford carry a big share of the exposure. London’s Metropolitan Police alone recorded 31% of all recorded knife offenses. Birmingham’s financial problems after its 2023 bankruptcy fed gang pressure and youth recruitment.
This is why the UK ranks this high — the surge is large, it is fast, and it has moved into modern crime categories that many still ignore.
2nd Place: Sweden
In Sweden, the crime surge looks less like random noise and more like a vicious system dominating society.
Sweden recorded 317 bombings in 2024 — more than double the 2023 figure — and that is not a normal jump in one year. Its gun homicide rate is 4 deaths per million people each year. The EU average is 1.6 per million, so Sweden has more than two and a half times the European average.
Only about 25% of gun homicides get cleared. Compare that to countries like Germany and Finland, where clearance rates are around 90%, and you can see the problem fast. If three out of four gun killings stay unsolved, the message to gangs is simple: the odds of quick punishment are low.
Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö form the main triangle, and suburbs like Husby, Biskopsgården, and Rosengård concentrate the worst issues. While certain types of crime like theft decreased over the last 10 years, property crime and drug-related crimes continue to increase.
What is most alarming is the age of the people getting pulled in. Police and lawmakers are dealing with a pipeline where children and very young teens get recruited into gang work — often for status, money, or both. Sweden is planning to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 13 in 2026 because the recruitment problem got that bad.
These gangs have both an ample supply of human material — teenagers — and firearms smuggled illegally from the Balkans. Large immigrant populations arrived in the 1990s and 2000s, but integration failed in too many places. Parallel communities grew. The population of Sweden exploded from 8.8 million to almost 11 million residents, but this tremendous growth was not accompanied by an increase in police forces. Sweden now has one of the lowest police-to-population ratios in the EU.
People with an immigrant background account for 80% of shooting victims and 64% of perpetrators, and eight out of ten fatal shootings tie back to criminal networks. So this is not broad random violence spread across all of Sweden — it is concentrated gang violence with a very clear social and geographic pattern.
If you want Sweden for schools, public services, and a high human development index, that logic is understandable. But when bombings become routine news and only one in four gun killings gets solved, you are not looking at a temporary blip anymore.
1st Place: Belgium — The European Country Where Crime Soared the Most
Belgium takes the top spot, and that shocks a lot of people because the country looks small, wealthy, and easy to manage on paper. But crime numbers moved fast in the wrong way, and beyond the good rail links and well-paid jobs, Belgium now requires much more caution than its old image suggests.
This is a drug-fueled homicide and shooting surge tied to gang warfare, and Brussels plus Antwerp carry much of the problem. Eurostat data for 2023 put the Brussels-Capital Region at 3.2 homicides per 100,000 people — the second-highest rate among major EU regions. Belgium has by far the worst homicide rates in Central Europe, with numbers comparable to Albania or Belarus.
The Flemish Peace Institute recorded 184 firearm incidents in Belgium in 2024, with multiple victims. Knife crime also soared. It is all linked to criminal organizations fighting over money and territory — weaponizing youth for the most violent acts. About 65% of shootings link to drug-related violence, and Brussels Public Prosecutor Julien Moinil warned that attacks are often “reprisals to win back certain territories.”
In Brussels alone, 2025 brought a record 96 shootings, many of them in areas like Anderlecht and Molenbeek.
Belgium ranks worse than the other countries on this list for one structural reason: logistics. Antwerp is one of Europe’s main drug gateways, and the huge volumes of drugs moved there are used to pay for weapons and recruits for criminal organizations. Combine that geographic advantage with chronic underinvestment in police forces, and you have the recipe for escalating trouble.
But things get even worse when you consider another hidden problem: Belgium has a huge issue with prison overcrowding. There are already far more inmates than the total capacity of the prison system can hold. No enough police officers, no places in prisons — and meanwhile, crime skyrocketed.
Brussels recorded a 19.6% year-over-year rise in pickpocketing in 2023 and accounted for 62% of all pickpocketing in Belgium that year.
Belgium ranks at number one because when locals are already using the word “narco-state,” you should assume that things have gone in a very wrong direction.
This ranking might look a bit gloomy, but the good news is that some European capitals are perfectly safe — and where a budget of $2,500 a month makes you wealthy. We have covered exactly those places in other articles on this site.
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Levi Borba is the founder of expatriateconsultancy.com, creator of the channel The Expat, and best-selling author. You can find him on X here. Some of the links above might be affiliated links, meaning the author earns a small commission if you make a purchase.
