Vehicle-taking offences rise in two districts despite Northern Ireland-wide fall
Vehicle-taking offences fell across Northern Ireland in 2025, but two policing districts moved sharply in the opposite direction, according to a comparison of PSNI figures carried out for PureCar.
Ards and North Down recorded 55 theft or aggravated-taking offences, up from 42 in 2024. Fermanagh and Omagh recorded 59, compared with 47 a year earlier. Together, the two districts had 25 more recorded offences even as the Northern Ireland total fell by 150.
The contrast is more significant than a routine local ranking. It means an encouraging region-wide headline did not describe the experience of every district. A motorist reading that vehicle-taking offences had fallen by more than 12% would not learn that the two areas were heading the other way.
The figures relate to calendar years and two distinct PSNI offence categories: theft or unauthorised taking of a motor vehicle and aggravated vehicle taking. They do not count thefts of tools from vehicles or attempted interference with parked cars. Those are separate offences and should not be folded into a stolen-car total.
Across Northern Ireland, the two categories combined fell from 1,215 offences in 2024 to 1,065 in 2025, a reduction of 12.3%. Theft or unauthorised taking fell from 1,015 to 911. Aggravated vehicle taking declined from 200 to 154.
In Ards and North Down, the change was driven by the ordinary theft or unauthorised-taking category. That rose from 35 to 48. Aggravated vehicle taking remained at seven. The district's combined total therefore increased by 13, or approximately 31%.
Fermanagh and Omagh registered a rise in both categories. Theft or unauthorised taking increased from 40 to 50, while aggravated taking rose from seven to nine. Its combined total was up by 12, or 25.5%.
The districts pulling in different directions
The wider breakdown shows how uneven the national decline was. Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon recorded 85 offences in the two categories, down from 132 — a fall of 47. In Derry City and Strabane, the count dropped from 122 to 95. Belfast moved from 391 to 367, a decline of 24. Newry, Mourne and Down fell from 125 to 106.
These are not marginal variations in a single national total. They are materially different directions of travel in the same reporting year, for the same offence codes. That raises a practical question for policing: why did the downward pattern fail to reach the two districts where the combined recorded counts rose?
It would be irresponsible to suggest an explanation without investigating the circumstances. The disclosure does not identify the vehicles targeted, the locations within each district, how many were recovered, or whether repeat offenders were involved. Nor can it show how changes in police recording or reporting might have affected the trend. An increase in offences alone does not establish that any particular town, street or car park became more dangerous.
The three-year view adds useful perspective. Ards and North Down recorded 61 combined offences in 2023, then 42 in 2024, before rising to 55 in 2025. Its increase was therefore a reversal of part of the previous year's decline, not a new three-year high. Fermanagh and Omagh's sequence was 55, 47 and 59 — making 2025 its highest figure of the three years shown.
That difference matters for the public interpretation. The two districts both moved against the regional direction in 2025, but they did not follow identical three-year paths. Treating them as interchangeable examples of a single crime wave would flatten an important distinction.
What the public should now be told
There is a limitation in the disclosure itself. The PSNI request names all 11 policing districts, yet the published answer visibly provides individual rows for ten and a separate Northern Ireland total. Causeway Coast and Glens is named in the request but does not have a displayed district row. PureCar has therefore not invented its breakdown or claimed a verified full 11-district ranking from that table.
The omission does not prevent the two increases from being calculated from their clearly labelled rows. It does mean an authority-wide comparison should be completed before officials make categorical claims about every district.
The figures were released in a February 2026 freedom-of-information response and labelled provisional for 2025 at the time of disclosure. Any later revisions need to be checked before treating the counts as a final current-year series. The comparison here concerns what that published disclosure actually reported.
For local drivers, the unresolved questions are concrete. What kinds of vehicles were being taken in the two areas? Were incidents spread across the districts or concentrated in particular types of location? How did recoveries and investigative outcomes compare? Those answers would provide a more meaningful picture of the problem than the crude implication that a regional decrease must have benefited everyone.
Northern Ireland's overall fall was real in the disclosed figures. So were the rises in Ards and North Down and Fermanagh and Omagh. The public should be able to see both.
