The latest calendar year crime data published by police has revealed that there were 34,991 offences reported in 2021, compared with 45,578 in 2020.

Predictably, all nine districts recorded fewer offences, with the two largest districts by population, Belconnen and Tuggeranong, down 25.5 per cent and nearly 20 per cent respectively.

Yet in a year in which traffic volumes across the territory fell dramatically as more people switched to working from home, collisions with injury increased slightly and 10 people were killed on the ACT's roads, as opposed to six in 2020.

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The largest category of offence types, which is collated as "other offences" and includes such matters as fraud, deception and related offences, environmental offences, weapons, drugs and public order offences produced the most significant drop, down 24 per cent year on year.

However, this is also attributable to police shifting their investigative capability away from these areas as significant pressure came on pushing resources across to higher priority crime types.

The ACT's specialist fraud team, for instance, was largely disbanded and its detectives deployed elsewhere during the height of the Delta wave of the COVID pandemic.

However, the levels of violence within the Canberra community continue, albeit with just a marginal 2 per cent increase in assaults over 2020. There were 2728 assaults reported in 2021, up from 2654 in 2020.

In a small jurisdiction, 13 homicides in one year - with September, July and February all recording three deaths - was a most unusual occurrence. This is the highest number of people murdered in the ACT since police data was first made public in 2014.

Previously, the most murders recorded in the ACT in a single year was 10, back in 2015.

Still unsolved from June 10 is the doorway murder of 48-year-old Glenn Walewicz, who opened the door to his Phillip townhouse just before midnight and was shot at point blank range in the chest.

Burglary and motor vehicle are now closely associated crime types, given that stealing late model cars is all but impossible for non-professional thieves without access to the electronically coded key or key fob.

Although burglaries across the territory fell by 6.4 per cent last year, vehicle theft rose by almost 4 per cent which suggests that more cars are being stolen from a single break-in such as occurred in July when four cars were stolen within minutes of each other from a Fyshwick car yard.

Last year Belconnen was the district where cars were most stolen with 284, followed by the Inner North with 269 and Tuggeranong with 222. The largest number of vehicles stolen in one month was in June last year, when 34 were stolen across the Inner South, a district which includes car yards of Fyshwick.

Family violence offences rose by nearly 10 per cent in 2021 over 2020, with nearly 3500 offences recorded. A quarter of the 481 sexual assaults recorded in the ACT last year occurred in the Inner North.

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