APN Sentinel™ (Safety & Sentiment Index)
Statistics on this page describe the 6,765 scored localities with more than 200 residents. 14,246 localities are scored in all.
APN Sentinel™ is one of five pillars in the APN Social Capital Index™, measuring safety and social cohesion from six components: violent and property crime risk, civic engagement (bonding capital), housing tenure security, demographic pressure, and acute vulnerability.
Equal-weighted mean of six components (24121–24126), with the weight shared equally across the components available for each locality. A locality needs at least four of the six.
Each component is a national percentile score. Four are ranked across every scored locality, including those with 200 residents or fewer; Bonding Capital and the Demographic Tension Index are ranked against localities with more than 200 residents. The means shown are for localities with more than 200 residents, so a mean below 50 shows that larger localities read lower on that component than smaller ones.
Crime risk (24121, 24122): recorded crime is read at the grain each police service publishes: council area in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania; police district in Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory; and a mix of council areas and districts in the Northern Territory. Every locality in a unit carries the unit’s rate. Rates are offences per 100,000 residents on the ABS estimated resident population at 30 June 2025, with the same offences counted in every jurisdiction. The reference period is the year to March 2026, except in South Australia (2024–25) and Tasmania (2022–23).
Demographic Tension Index (24125): one of its four measures, population growth, is read at district (SA2) grain. Localities with 200 residents or fewer have no score on this component and enter the index on the other five.
Publication rule: localities with 200 residents or fewer are excluded from every published Sentinel ranking, leaderboard, top-or-bottom list and map, in all states and territories, under the APN Codex uniform small-locality publication rule. They are scored; the rule governs publication, not measurement. This page reports national aggregate statistics, not individual locality rankings.
The other four pillars of the APN Social Capital Index™ (24100).
- Mean of the valid component scores, at least four of six
- Methodology v0.5, 12 October 2026
- Statistics describe localities with more than 200 residents
