St John's Wood is a safe area, and by Westminster's standards a remarkably calm one. Its crime rate runs about two-thirds below the borough's. Violence makes up a smaller share of it than it does nationally. The commonest complaints are nuisance, shoplifting and theft. The biggest threat to a resident's money in St John's Wood is still the price of the flat.
The Metropolitan Police recorded 7,525 crimes in St John's Wood in the year to May 2026, a published rate of about 155 per 1,000 residents. That is about 65% below the Westminster average. For a district inside central London's most crime-heavy borough, it is a very respectable number.
The borough figure makes the gap concrete. Westminster as a whole runs at about 440 crimes per 1,000 residents over the same twelve months, against St John's Wood's 155. A buyer arriving from almost anywhere else in the borough will notice the change in temperature.
None of this comes from an empty suburb. St John's Wood packs in about 21,800 people per square kilometre, about 12% of households are overcrowded and unemployment is about 4%. It is a dense, busy, mostly rented piece of inner London. It manages to stay calm without being thinly populated.
The crime mix leans towards nuisance and theft. Anti-social behaviour is the largest category at about 22% of recorded crime, against 16% across England and Wales. Violence and sexual offences, a broad legal grouping that includes common assault without injury, make up about 20% here against 35% nationally, well below the usual share. Shoplifting is about 12% against 8% nationally, other theft about 9% against 7%, and vehicle crime about 6% against 5%, close to the national mix. Theft from the person stands out at about 7% against 2% nationally. With 279 shop premises on the business rates list, shoplifters at least have choice. The Metropolitan Police's street-level crime map is the place to check the road you are looking at, since a district figure blends the high street with the back streets.
What happens after a report is a separate question, and the answer comes from the force as a whole. The Metropolitan Police charges a suspect in about 10% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which puts it 33rd of 42 forces. About 53% of its cases close with no suspect identified. Those are the force's figures across all of London, and they describe how a report is handled, with nothing to say about how likely a resident here is to need to make one.
Safety is one of St John's Wood's real strengths. The crime that does happen is mostly the low-level kind, in a borough where the rest of the map runs a good deal hotter.