Burnaby sits in the middle of the Metro Vancouver pack on crime, and it is not the quietest city in the region. On the one measure that lets you compare municipalities directly, Burnaby records 57 Criminal Code offences per 1,000 residents, which is below Vancouver and New Westminster, level with Richmond, and above both Surrey and Coquitlam.
That last comparison matters, because plenty of pages about Burnaby claim it sits below Surrey. The reverse is true. And the figure that should worry a resident more than the offence count is the caseload: Burnaby’s officers carry 53 files each, the heaviest load of any large municipality in the region.
The comparable numbers, city by city
These all come from the same report, for the same year, on the same measure. Comparing across reports, years or measures is worthless.
| City | Offences per 1,000 | Total offences | Officers | Files per officer | Policing cost per resident |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New Westminster | 61 | 5,623 | 115 | 48 | $397 |
| Vancouver | 60 | 45,749 | 1,452 | 32 | $606 |
| Burnaby | 57 | 17,104 | 301 | 53 | $288 |
| Richmond | 57 | 13,798 | 292 | 46 | $325 |
| Surrey | 53 | 36,795 | 1,111 | 32 | $353 |
| Coquitlam | 43 | 7,524 | 179 | 40 | $246 |
Reference year 2024. Source: BC Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General, Police Resources in British Columbia, 2024, still the most recent edition as of September 2026.
Burnaby’s population served in that report is 298,978, which is larger than the census city count because the detachment area takes in more than the municipal boundary.
Two things stand out. Policing here is cheap, at $288 per resident against Vancouver’s $606. And it is policed thinly: 53 files per officer against 32 in both Vancouver and Surrey. Whether you read that as efficient or stretched depends on how quickly you expect a response to a break-in.
Why the national headline numbers are not about Burnaby
Burnaby is not its own census metropolitan area. It sits inside the Vancouver CMA, so when Statistics Canada publishes its annual crime tables, Burnaby is folded in with Vancouver, Surrey, Richmond and the rest.
For reference year 2025, released on 22 July 2026, the Vancouver CMA recorded a Crime Severity Index of 83.5 and a crime rate of 5,672 per 100,000 residents. Statistics Canada printed those as up 1% and up 3% respectively. British Columbia’s severity index was 92.4 and Canada’s 75.0.
Do not put the CMA’s 5,672 next to Burnaby’s 57. One is per hundred thousand across the whole region, the other is per thousand in one city. Seeing them in the same paragraph without that caveat is the clearest sign a page has not checked its own numbers.
The Crime Severity Index is also a different thing again. It weights each offence by the average sentence it attracts, then indexes the result against 2006 equalling 100. It is not a rate and cannot be compared to one.
What is actually happening: shoplifting
Burnaby RCMP publishes quarterly counts, and they show where the pressure is.
| Quarter | Violent | Property | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 2025 | 700 | 2,704 | 3,404 |
| Q4 2025 | 683 | 2,834 | 3,517 |
| Q1 2026 | 674 | 2,963 | 3,637 |
Source: Burnaby RCMP quarterly crime statistics.
Violence is drifting down, which the detachment recorded as a 12% year-over-year fall in the first quarter of 2026. Property crime is going the other way, up 6% over the same comparison, and shoplifting is the driver: up around a third year over year in both the first quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026.
That has a geography, and it is Metrotown. A joint retail-theft operation ran there from 20 December 2025 to 24 January 2026 and produced 73 arrests with more than $23,000 in recovered merchandise. A five-day Transit Police project at Metrotown Station in May and June 2026 produced 70 arrests, 47 new charges and about $25,000 in recovered goods.
None of that is an argument against living in Burnaby. It does tell you that the retail cores are where enforcement is concentrated, which is useful if you are choosing between a tower above a mall and a street in Lochdale.
SkyTrain, and whether Burnaby is safe at night
One of the most transit-dependent cities in the region, Burnaby sits on both the Expo and Millennium lines, so transit safety is a fair question.
Metro Vancouver Transit Police reported 1,508 property offences across the whole system in 2025, up 4%, and 1,428 offences against persons, down 12%. Arrests on new charges rose 21% to 558, alongside 829 warrant arrests.
Those are system-wide figures covering every station from Waterfront to King George, not Burnaby-specific ones. Nothing official breaks transit crime down by station in a way that would let you rank Metrotown against Brentwood.
Practical version: the stations are busy and staffed, the trains run until around one in the morning, and the risk profile at a major interchange late on a Friday is different from a residential street ten minutes’ walk away. The same holds for every city on the line.
The safest neighbourhoods in Burnaby, and why this page will not list them
No official body publishes crime statistics by Burnaby neighbourhood. Not for Metrotown, Brentwood, Burnaby Heights, Deer Lake, Lochdale, Edmonds or the SFU area.
Two sources come close and neither does the job:
The City’s property crime dashboard maps individual reported incidents, and it is genuinely worth opening before you make an offer on a house. But it covers only five property offence types, deliberately approximates each location to protect privacy, and carries no violent crime at all. You can read a block from it. You cannot rank an area.
Burnaby RCMP’s quarterly reports break counts down by internal police districts labelled D1 to D4. No published map ties those codes to neighbourhood names, so the breakdown is unusable for a resident.
Any page ranking Burnaby neighbourhoods by a crime score is generating it from a model. It will look authoritative and it is not measuring anything the police recorded.
What you can do instead is walk the street at three different times, open the city’s dashboard for that address, and ask whether the block has a Block Watch going.
What the city is spending on it
Burnaby’s 2026 RCMP budget is $96.95 million, up from $90.94 million planned for 2025, and it accounts for 11.7% of city operating expenses.
The bigger commitment is capital: $182 million between 2026 and 2028 for a new Community Safety Building to replace a detachment building that dates from 1967. For a city of nearly 300,000 policed by 301 officers at the highest caseload in the region, the facility was overdue.
Chief Superintendent Gurmakh Parmar took over as officer in charge on 6 October 2025.
How this fits the rest of the picture
Crime is one input among several. What living in Burnaby is actually like covers the commute, the schools, the hospital and what housing costs, and we have run the same numbers for every BC municipality if you are comparing cities. For the city next door, the Vancouver figures sit in the same report.
Moving day, and the small security problem nobody plans for
A move is a few hours with your door propped open and your possessions visible from the street. In a tower that means a loading bay and a lift key; in a house it means boxes on a driveway.
A crew that works Burnaby stages loads rather than leaving them sitting, and knows which buildings need the elevator booked. Our Burnaby movers do this weekly and can tell you what a move from your address involves before the day. We cover the region as a Vancouver moving company.
Frequently asked questions
Is Burnaby a safe place to live?
Middling for Metro Vancouver, and better than its size suggests. Burnaby recorded 57 Criminal Code offences per 1,000 residents in the 2024 provincial policing report, below Vancouver at 60 and New Westminster at 61, level with Richmond, and above Surrey at 53 and Coquitlam at 43. The recent trend is violence falling and property crime, especially shoplifting, rising.
What is the crime rate in Burnaby?
The comparable figure is 57 Criminal Code offences per 1,000 residents, from 17,104 offences across a policed population of 298,978, for reference year 2024. The city is not its own census metropolitan area, so Statistics Canada’s national tables report it inside the Vancouver CMA, which recorded a crime rate of 5,672 per 100,000 and a Crime Severity Index of 83.5 for 2025.
Which are the safest neighbourhoods in Burnaby?
Nobody publishes crime data by Burnaby neighbourhood, so this cannot be answered with police figures. The city’s property crime dashboard maps individual incidents and is worth checking for a specific address, though it covers only five property offence types and approximates locations. The detachment reports by internal districts D1 to D4, which no published map ties to neighbourhood names. What each area is like to live in, crime aside, is in our Burnaby neighbourhood guide.
Is Burnaby safe at night on SkyTrain?
Transit Police recorded 1,428 offences against persons across the entire Metro Vancouver system in 2025, down 12% on the year, and 1,508 property offences, up 4%. Those cover every station in the region, and no official breakdown by station exists. Enforcement in Burnaby has concentrated on retail theft around Metrotown, where two operations in 2026 produced more than 140 arrests between them.
Is crime going up in Burnaby?
It depends which crime. Quarterly figures show violent offences down 12% and property offences up 6% in the first quarter of 2026 against the same quarter of 2025, with total offences up 2%. Shoplifting rose about a third year over year in both 2025 and 2026 first quarters.
