Crime Statistics in Singapore 2026 | Crime Rates, Scams & Key Facts

Crime Statistics in Singapore 2026

Crime statistics in Singapore for 2026 tell two very different stories happening at once: traditional physical crime remains genuinely rare by any global standard, while scams and cybercrime have become, in the words of Singapore’s own Minister of State for Home Affairs, “the most prevalent crime in Singapore.” According to the Singapore Police Force’s Annual Crime Brief 2025, released February 24, 2026, physical crime cases rose modestly to 20,857 in 2025, while scam cases fell 27.6% to 37,308 — the first recorded decline since police began tracking scams as a separate category in 2023, though total losses still reached S$913.1 million for the year.

This report compiles the key verified statistics on crime in Singapore in 2026, covering physical crime trends, the SPF’s newest scam and cybercrime data, homicide and violent crime figures, drug enforcement, and how Singapore’s crime rate compares internationally. Sources include the Singapore Police Force’s Annual Crime Brief 2025, the Singapore Department of Statistics (SingStat), and Ministry of Home Affairs survey data. Because Singapore restructured its crime reporting categories in 2022, splitting “Overall Crime” into “Physical Crimes” and “Scams & Cybercrimes,” this article notes which reporting framework each figure comes from.

Interesting Facts About Crime in Singapore 2026

Source: Singapore Police Force (SPF) Annual Crime Brief 2025, released February 24, 2026; Singapore Department of Statistics (SingStat); World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2021

The numbers above capture a genuinely unusual crime landscape: Singapore’s physical crime rate of roughly 340 per 100,000 residents places it near the very bottom of any international comparison, yet the country loses close to a billion Singapore dollars a year to scams alone — a figure that dwarfs the financial impact of all physical crime combined. The 27.6% drop in scam cases in 2025 marks a genuine turning point after years of relentless growth, with Minister of State Goh Pei Ming crediting intensified enforcement, though he cautioned that “the situation remains concerning” given scams’ continued dominance of Singapore’s overall crime picture.

What stands out most is the sheer scale mismatch between scam and physical crime volumes historically: scam and cybercrime cases per 100,000 population climbed from just 111 in 2018 to 851 by 2023, an almost eightfold increase in five years, while physical crime rates have remained comparatively flat. This divergence explains why Singapore’s overall crime rate hit a 10-year high of 1,255 per 100,000 in 2024, driven almost entirely by digital fraud rather than any breakdown in the country’s famously strict approach to conventional law and order.

Singapore Physical Crime Statistics 2026

SINGAPORE PHYSICAL CRIME CASES — 2024 vs 2025
════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
2024  ████████████████████████████████████████  19,969
2025  ██████████████████████████████████████████  20,857  (+4.4%)
════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
Physical crime rate: ~340 per 100,000 residents (near bottom of any global comparison)

Source: Singapore Police Force Annual Crime Brief 2025; Mothership.SG and Police Life coverage of SPF release, February 24, 2026

Singapore’s physical crime figures for 2025 show a mixed but overall stable picture, with the modest 4.4% increase in total cases falling well within what crime analysts consider normal year-to-year variance for a country whose physical crime volume has hovered near 20,000 cases annually for the entire post-2020 reporting period. Rape cases saw the sharpest percentage increase among any major physical crime category, rising nearly 20% to 479 cases — a trend SPF has flagged for continued monitoring even as the department stated there is “no discernible trend suggesting a degradation of the law-and-order situation.”

The murder count falling from a five-year high of 10 in 2024 to just 7 in 2025 is a notably positive data point, particularly given that five of the seven 2025 murder cases involved culprits already known to the victims — including a high-profile Yishun stabbing case stemming from a neighbor noise dispute. Meanwhile, the 57.4% surge in dormitory theft cases, rising from 54 to 85, stands out as one of the more specific and unusual trends in the 2025 data, with police attributing most incidents to residents taking belongings from sleeping or distracted victims within shared dormitory housing.

Singapore Scam and Cybercrime Statistics 2026

SINGAPORE SCAM CASES AND LOSSES — RECENT TREND
════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
Scam Cases
  2024  ████████████████████████████████████████  51,501
  2025  █████████████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░  37,308  (-27.6%)

Total Losses (S$)
  2024  ████████████████████████████████████████  S$1.124 billion
  2025  █████████████████████████████████░░░░░░░  S$913.1 million  (-17.9%)
════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
Scams and cybercrime combined: 41,974 cases in 2025 (-24.8%)
Scams remain 88.9% of the combined total

Source: Singapore Police Force Annual Scam and Cybercrime Brief 2025, released February 25, 2026; theonlinecitizen.com and JCP Law LLC coverage; SingStat Public Safety data

The 2025 decline in scam cases represents a genuine milestone — the first year-on-year drop since Singapore began tracking scams as a distinct category in 2023 — but the underlying scale remains staggering. Even after a 27.6% reduction in case volume, Singaporeans still lost S$913.1 million to fraudsters in a single year, a figure that dwarfs the total financial impact of every category of physical crime combined. The persistence of 81.8% self-effected transfers, meaning victims willingly sent money after being socially engineered rather than having their accounts directly hacked, underscores that Singapore’s scam problem remains fundamentally a psychological manipulation challenge rather than a pure cybersecurity one.

Government official impersonation scams bucked the overall downward trend entirely, with losses actually climbing 60.5% to S$242.9 million — a category Minister Goh specifically flagged as a signature concern, involving victims pressured into handing over cash, gold bars, or luxury watches under the pretext of an ongoing “investigation.” For broader context on how AI is reshaping the global scam landscape in ways directly relevant to Singapore’s fraud enforcement challenge, our AI Fraud Statistics 2026 report documents that AI-enabled fraud grew 1,210% globally in 2025, a trend security researchers expect to increasingly intersect with the same social-engineering scam patterns driving the bulk of Singapore’s own losses.

Singapore Scam Trends: 2018–2025 Historical Data

Source: Singapore Police Force Annual Reports; Singapore Department of Statistics; Wikipedia “Crime in Singapore” compilation of SPF Annual Reports

The long-run scam trend from 2018 through 2023 shows one of the most dramatic sustained increases in any crime category tracked by Singapore’s police, with the rate per 100,000 population climbing from 111 to 851 — nearly an eightfold jump in just five years. This escalation tracked closely with Singaporeans’ rapidly increasing dependence on digital banking, e-commerce, and online communication platforms, all of which created expanding attack surfaces for scammers even as the underlying population and offline crime rate remained largely stable.

The 2025 reversal, following a peak that likely exceeded 55,000 combined scam and cybercrime cases in 2024, represents the first genuine inflection point in this multi-year trend. SPF has attributed the turnaround to a combination of intensified enforcement operations, platform accountability legislation, and expanded public education campaigns — though officials have been careful to frame this as an early positive signal rather than a declared victory, particularly given that scam losses in absolute dollar terms remain close to a billion Singapore dollars even after the decline.

Homicide and Violent Crime in Singapore 2026

Source: Wikipedia “Crime in Singapore”; Malaymail coverage of SPF Mid-Year Crime Brief 2025, August 26, 2025

Singapore’s violent crime rate remains extraordinarily low by any international benchmark, with official figures placing violent crime at just 9 incidents per 100,000 population as of the most recent comprehensive reporting — a rate that would rank among the lowest of any country in the world if measured on a comparable basis. The consistently small absolute numbers involved, such as the drop from 10 murders in 2024 to just 7 in 2025, illustrate how even modest year-to-year fluctuations can register as double-digit percentage swings simply because the underlying case volume is so small to begin with.

Singapore’s approach to violent and weapons-related crime is shaped substantially by its exceptionally strict legal framework, including a near-total ban on civilian firearm ownership and the death penalty for offenses including murder, drug trafficking, and illegal firearm possession. This legal severity, combined with high conviction rates and swift prosecution, is widely credited by Singaporean officials and international observers alike as a central factor behind the country’s persistently low violent crime figures, even as debate continues internationally over the broader deterrent effectiveness of capital punishment.

Property Crime and Theft Trends in Singapore 2026

Source: Singapore Police Force Annual Crime Brief; Malaymail coverage of SPF statistics, February 2025 and February 2026

Shoplifting has emerged as one of Singapore’s most persistent physical crime concerns, accounting for a full 21.2% of all physical crime cases — meaning roughly one in every five physical crimes recorded in the city-state is a shop theft incident. The 7.6% year-on-year rise to 4,237 cases in 2024 continued a sharp upward trajectory from just 2,652 cases in 2021, with major retailers including NTUC FairPrice, Cold Storage, and Watsons among the most frequently targeted locations, and cosmetics, food, and personal care products the most commonly stolen items.

The involvement of younger offenders in shoplifting is particularly notable, with 379 individuals aged 10 to 19 arrested for shop theft in 2024 alone, representing nearly 21% of all shop theft arrests that year. In response, SPF has partnered with major retailers through its Safety, Trust & Awareness (STAR) programme, which added 100 new retail outlets in 2025 including Sephora, Popular, and Challenger, several of which are exploring AI-powered detection technology to flag suspicious in-store behavior before theft occurs.

Singapore Crime Rate: International Comparison 2026

Source: World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2021; JCP Law LLC crime analysis, 2025-2026

Singapore’s 17th-place global ranking in the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, alongside top-tier sub-rankings for criminal justice effectiveness (7th) and absence of corruption (3rd), provides independent international validation for the low physical crime figures documented throughout this report. For a useful contrast against countries with considerably higher property and violent crime rates despite comparable levels of economic development, our Crime Statistics in Australia coverage documents that Australia recorded 448 homicide victims in 2024 alone — a figure that, scaled to Singapore’s much smaller population, still reflects a meaningfully higher per-capita violent crime burden than Singapore’s own consistently low homicide counts.

Singapore’s physical crime rate of roughly 340 per 100,000 residents places it firmly among the safest jurisdictions globally when measured purely on conventional street-level and property crime, a reputation reinforced by the near-total absence of pickpocketing and violent street crime that international visitors and residents alike frequently cite as a defining feature of life in the city-state. This favorable physical crime picture stands in sharp contrast to Singapore’s much higher relative exposure to scams and cybercrime, a pattern that increasingly distinguishes wealthy, highly digitized economies from the more traditional street-crime-dominated profiles seen in many other countries. Our Crime Statistics in UK report shows a broadly similar pattern in the UK, where fraud incidents surged 31% to reach 4.2 million cases even as traditional violent crime categories continued a long-term decline — reinforcing that Singapore’s scam-dominated crime profile reflects a wider global shift rather than an isolated national anomaly.

Public Support for Crime Deterrence Policy in Singapore 2026

Source: Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) survey, released September 19, per Malaymail coverage

Public attitudes toward Singapore’s strict deterrence-based approach to crime have grown even more supportive over time, with the Ministry of Home Affairs’ most recent survey finding 77.4% of respondents either strongly agreeing or agreeing with the use of the death penalty for the most serious offenses — up from 73.7% just two years earlier. Respondents most commonly cited the belief that capital punishment deters the most serious crimes, that such crimes pose genuine danger to society, and that the penalty is commensurate with the severity of the offense.

This sustained and strengthening public support provides important social context for understanding why Singapore’s overall crime policy framework, including its uniquely severe penalties for drug trafficking and firearms offenses, has remained largely unchanged even as the country’s actual crime landscape has shifted dramatically toward digital fraud. The gap between overwhelming public support for punitive measures against traditional violent and drug crime, and the comparatively different enforcement and prevention toolkit required to combat scams and cybercrime, represents one of the more interesting policy tensions likely to shape Singapore’s crime-fighting priorities through the remainder of the decade.

Data Reliability Notes for Crime Statistics in Singapore 2026

Source: Cross-referenced SPF Annual Crime Brief 2025, SingStat, and independent legal analysis, current as of mid-2026

Because the Singapore Police Force restructured its crime reporting framework in 2022, splitting what was previously a single “Overall Crime” figure into separate “Physical Crimes” and “Scams & Cybercrimes” categories, readers comparing Singapore’s crime statistics across the 2022 boundary should account for this methodological shift rather than assuming a direct year-over-year comparison. All 2025 figures in this report reflect the SPF’s Annual Crime Brief 2025 and Annual Scam and Cybercrime Brief 2025, both released in late February 2026 and representing the most current comprehensive official data available at the time of writing.

Disclaimer: This research report is compiled from publicly available sources. While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is given as to the completeness or reliability of the information. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions, losses, or damages of any kind arising from the use of this report.

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