Indoor crime now accounts for a third of offences, crime review shows

A third of all crime in Malta now takes place in indoor settings, outside of the police’s immediate reach, a new crime report shows.

Two decades ago, in 2005, just 3% of all crime took place indoors. This rose to 15% in 2015 and 34% today, the Annual Crime Review shows.

The review tracks reported crime from one year to the next, showing how its nature continues to evolve.

Over the years, the report shows, crimes taking place in physical settings, such as theft and violent crime, had dropped drastically.

Meanwhile, those taking place behind closed doors, such as online fraud and domestic violence, had increased.

Domestic violence now makes up 14% of all reported crimes, a slight drop over the previous year, but a staggering 1918% rise since 2005. Meanwhile, there were just short of 2,000 cases of fraud reported last year, roughly 12% of all reported crime.

Criminologist and academic Saviour Formosa, whose CrimeMalta Observatory compiles the annual review, told a Cabinet meeting on Monday morning that these figures reflect better awareness and reporting mechanisms, in the case of domestic violence, as well as how fraud has now gone online.

Police Commissioner Angelo Gafa' described this shift as bringing unprecedented challenges to law enforcement authorities, with police unable to resort to tried and tested methods of surveillance and deterrence, instead having to rely heavily on raising awareness.

Indoor crimes “are potentially out of reach of proactive visual capture through deterrence by community police, mobile units and technologies,” the report says.

The report is compiled by criminologist Saviour Formosa. File photo: Mark Zammit Cordina

Crime rate continues to drop

The report shows how Malta’s crime rate has continued to dip, now dropping to its lowest level since 1998, bar the Covid year of 2020.

In 2025, there were 15,594 offences reported, at a rate of 27 per 1,000 people. This was 1,000 reported crimes fewer than the previous year and well below the EU average of 49 reported offences per 1,000 people, the report says.

This comes two decades after Malta’s most criminal year on record, with 18,500 crimes reported in 2005, or 46 per 1,000 people.

The drop is driven by a sharp decrease in theft, which dipped by 15% in 2025 compared to the previous year.

Gafa said police had focused on slashing pickpocketing and theft from beaches, both of which were amongst the most widespread forms of theft.

Malta’s theft rate is now lower than at any point in the past 25 years, the figures show, with eight thefts per 1,000 people.

Nevertheless, theft remains the most common form of crime, making up 28% of all reported offences.

Law enforcement authorities also seized a record quantity of drugs in 2025, with a particular spike in cocaine seizures. In total, around €14 million worth of drugs were seized in Malta during the year, Gafa said.

The drop in crime comes in spite of Malta’s growing population, Formosa said. Although the population grew by over 170,000 people since 2005, there are now 3,000 fewer cases of reported crime, he argued

Had Malta’s crime rate remained similar to that in 2005, there would have been over 26,000 crimes reported per year, the report suggests.