WHEN THE HEADLINES FEEL LOUDER THAN THE NUMBERS

Over the past year, it has been hard to scroll through the news or social media without coming across a story that unsettles the picture of Singapore as one of the safest cities in the world. A Porsche ploughing into Suntec City's Fountain of Wealth. Dashcam clips of drivers screaming at each other or kicking car doors in the middle of traffic, shared and reshared across the growing ecosystem of community traffic and dashcam pages. Six men charged with rioting after allegedly beating another man unconscious in a Yishun carpark. Fires breaking out in HDB flats, some linked to personal mobility devices (PMDs), others reportedly set deliberately by loan sharks or by people in the grip of a mental health crisis.

Put together, these stories can create a strong, almost visceral impression: that Singapore is becoming a more dangerous place to live. At FYT Consulting, our instinct whenever a strong perception forms is to ask a simple question before accepting it: what does the data actually say? This is not about dismissing anyone's unease — a viral video or a tragic fire is real, and the people affected deserve to have that taken seriously. It is about separating what is a genuine, measurable shift from what is a vivid story that has travelled unusually far and fast. We looked at official Singapore statistics on crime against persons, fire fatalities and fire occurrences by building type, and road traffic fatalities and injuries, covering between four and roughly forty years of history depending on what was available. Here is what we found, and what we think it means.

Is Singapore experiencing more violent crime?

Start with the incident that probably unsettled people the most: the case in Yishun in July 2026, where police say a 48-year-old man was left unconscious after being surrounded, punched and kicked in a carpark, and six men aged between 18 and 27 were subsequently charged with rioting. It is a serious, disturbing case, and it is right that it be treated as one.

But one incident, however alarming, is not a trend line. The Singapore Police Force's own Annual Crime Brief 2025 shows the crime rate against persons has stayed remarkably flat over the past four years, sitting in a narrow band of roughly 75 to 87 cases per 100,000 residents between 2022 and 2025, with the overall physical crime rate hovering close to 340 cases per 100,000 residents throughout that period. Physical crime cases did rise 4.4 per cent in 2025, from 19,969 to 20,857, but the SPF itself describes this as a “minor uptick,” well within normal year-to-year variation, and theft-related offences — not violence — continue to make up around 40 per cent of the total. Violent and serious property crime remains, in the SPF's own words, comparatively rare.

Source - Singstat

So the crime data does not support the idea that Singapore is becoming a more violent place in any general sense. The Yishun case, and the handful of others like it that circulate widely once shared online, stand out precisely because they are unusual — not because they represent a new normal.

Is the fire risk in your home actually rising?

This is where the data gets more interesting, and where public instinct turns out to be partly right. The fire fatality rate per 100,000 population has been genuinely volatile for two decades, swinging between roughly zero and 0.15 in most years we reviewed. That volatility is itself worth flagging: Singapore's population is large, so a rate this low usually reflects only a handful of fire deaths in any given year, which means small changes in the death count can swing the “rate” dramatically. A single additional tragedy can look, statistically, like a spike — so this figure should be read with some caution.

Source - Singatat

That caveat matters, but it does not fully explain what shows up over roughly the last three years: a fatality rate that has drifted upward compared with the relative calm of the years before it. That shift lines up with what the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) itself reported for 2025: of 2,050 fire calls attended that year, 1,051 were in residential premises — up 8.6 per cent on 2024. Within that, fires linked to personal mobility devices (PMDs) specifically rose 24 per cent to 31 cases, even as fires linked to power-assisted bicycles and mobility aids fell sharply, likely reflecting earlier safety measures taking hold. A fatal fire in a Bukit Merah flat in August 2025, which killed two people, was suspected to have been caused by a PMD battery pack. In November 2025, two further PMD-related fires in Ang Mo Kio and Yishun led to more than 200 residents being evacuated.

Source - Singstat

The chart of fire occurrences by building type over more than 40 years tells a reassuring long-run story: fires in residential and other buildings fell dramatically from a peak in the late 1990s to a low around 2020 to 2021, likely reflecting decades of fire safety improvements. But that same chart shows occurrences ticking back upward in the last few years, consistent with the SCDF's more recent figures. It is also worth being clear-eyed about the other causes making headlines: arson linked to loan shark harassment (three teenagers were arrested in September 2025 over an alleged fire at a Boon Lay flat tied to a harassment case) and fires set by individuals experiencing serious mental health episodes (a 44-year-old man was given a mandatory treatment order in 2026 after starting a fire while in the grip of a delusional disorder) are real, but they form a distinct and much smaller category of incident from the PMD-driven rise, and each warrants a different kind of response.

Taken together: residential fire risk has plausibly increased over the last three to five years, and the most identifiable driver is the growth of personal mobility devices and their batteries, alongside the long tail of older HDB flats that still lack fire alarm devices — as of June 2025, only around 17 per cent of flats had them installed. This is one place where public perception and the data are pointing in the same direction.

Are Singapore's roads becoming more dangerous?

The road safety data tells a similar two-part story: a long-run improvement, followed by a real and fairly sharp reversal in the last few years. Total road traffic fatalities fell from a historical peak of over 300 a year in the mid-1980s to a low of roughly 85 in 2021, likely helped by lighter traffic during the pandemic. Since then, they have climbed steadily back up to 149 in 2025 — the highest figure in a decade, according to the Singapore Police Force's Annual Road Traffic Situation Report 2025, and a 4.9 per cent increase on 2024 alone.

Source - Singstat

The number of people injured in road accidents follows the same pattern: a low of around 6,600 in 2020, climbing back to 9,955 in 2025, a 6.6 per cent increase on the year before.

Source - Singstat

Two groups stand out in the official statistics as driving much of this increase. Elderly pedestrians, who make up 12.9 per cent of Singapore's population, accounted for 75 per cent of all fatal pedestrian accidents in 2025; the number of elderly pedestrians killed more than doubled, from 11 in 2024 to 27 in 2025. Motorcyclists and pillion riders, who represent only around 15 per cent of the vehicle population, were involved in 54.8 per cent of all traffic accidents and 53.8 per cent of all fatalities. The widely shared Porsche crash into Suntec City's Fountain of Wealth in July 2024, caused by a driver who had been drinking over several hours before getting behind the wheel, is a memorable illustration of driver risk — but it is the aggregate patterns around elderly pedestrians and motorcyclists, not isolated incidents like this one, that the data says are actually moving the needle.

So on the roads, as with residential fires, the underlying data backs up the public mood: 2025 was a genuinely worse year for road safety than 2020 or 2021, and by some measures the worst in a decade.

What's actually changing, and what isn't?

Putting the datasets side by side produces a more nuanced picture than either “Singapore is becoming dangerous” or “nothing has changed.” Crime against persons has stayed essentially flat; a small number of shocking incidents circulating widely online have outpaced any real shift in the underlying rate. Fire and road safety, on the other hand, show a genuine deterioration over the last three to five years, off a low base set during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021.

It's worth being careful about why, because several plausible explanations are tangled together and not all of them are equally well established. Some of the increase in fires and traffic accidents is very likely a simple rebound: fewer people were on the roads and more time was spent at home during 2020 and 2021, so a return to pre-pandemic activity levels would mechanically push both figures back up. But the Singapore Police Force has explicitly flagged the 2025 road figures as a 10-year high, not merely a return to a pre-pandemic baseline, which suggests rebound alone does not fully explain it. The rapid rise of personal mobility devices and their lithium batteries is a newer and more specific factor behind the residential fire trend, and one that regulators are visibly responding to through HDB fire alarm rollouts and device safety rules. The ageing of Singapore's population is a slower-moving but well-documented factor behind the rise in elderly pedestrian deaths. The growth of delivery and ride-hailing work plausibly puts more motorcyclists on the road for longer hours — though we would flag this as a reasonable hypothesis rather than something the data reviewed here proves directly.

Finally, it is worth naming the role of social media itself. Singapore now has a whole ecosystem of community-run traffic and dashcam pages that did not exist, or existed at far smaller scale, a decade ago. None of them created road rage or dangerous driving, but collectively they have made individual incidents dramatically more visible than before, and visibility shapes perception independently of whether the underlying rate has moved at all. That is precisely why the discipline of checking the data matters: it lets you tell the difference between “this got more visible” and “this got more common” — and, in the case of fires and road safety in Singapore over the last few years, the honest answer is that both things are true at once.

The takeaway

None of this is a call to be less concerned about safety in Singapore — especially for older pedestrians, motorcyclists, and residents of older HDB flats without fire alarms. Quite the opposite: knowing where the data genuinely shows elevated risk means concern and resources can be pointed at the right places, rather than spread thin by a general sense that “everything is getting worse.” That is really the point of this exercise. A single viral video or news story is a poor guide to what is actually changing in a city of six million people; a well-sourced dataset, read carefully and with appropriate humility about small numbers and short time windows, is a much better one. Building that habit — checking perception against the numbers before acting on it — is a skill anyone can learn, and it is one of the most practical, transferable forms of data literacy we help professionals and organisations build at FYT Consulting.

Sources

• SPF Annual Crime Brief 2025 — Physical Crime Cases Saw a Minor Uptick Last Year — https://www.police.gov.sg/media-hub/police-life/2026/02/physical-crime-cases-saw-a-minor-uptick-last-year

• Singapore Police Force, Annual Crime Brief 2025 (PDF) — https://www.police.gov.sg/-/media/SPF/Media-Room/Statistics/Annual-Crime-Brief-2025/Annual-Crime-Brief-2025.pdf

• Six Men To Be Charged For Rioting (Yishun, July 2026) — Singapore Police Force — https://www.police.gov.sg/Media-Hub/News/2026/07/20260728_six_men_to_be_charged_for_rioting

• Man, 48, unconscious after Yishun fight — Mothership — https://mothership.sg/2026/07/6-men-charged-yishun-rioting/

• SCDF reports 26.9% drop in active mobility device fires but overall fire cases rise in 2025 — The Online Citizen — https://theonlinecitizen.com/2026/02/11/scdf-reports-26-9-drop-in-active-mobility-device-fires-but-overall-fire-cases-rise-in-2025

• More fire injuries and EV blazes in 2025; nearly half of emergency calls involved seniors: SCDF — Yahoo News Singapore — https://sg.news.yahoo.com/more-fatal-fires-ev-blazes-020000349.html

• SCDF: Bukit Merah flat fire that killed two likely caused by PMD battery pack — The Online Citizen — https://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2025/08/14/scdf-bukit-merah-flat-fire-that-killed-two-likely-caused-by-pmd-battery-pack/

• Statistics for Fires Involving Active Mobility Devices at HDB Flats — Ministry of Home Affairs — https://www.mha.gov.sg/media-room/newsroom/statistics-for-fires-involving-active-mobility-devices-and-measures-against-such-fires-at-hdb-flats/

• 3 teens arrested for loanshark harassment by fire, Boon Lay — Singapore Police Force — https://www.police.gov.sg/Media-Hub/News/2025/09/20250929_three_teenagers_arrested_for_loanshark_harassment_by_fire_within_six_hours

• 3 teens arrested for fire at Boon Lay flat in loanshark harassment case — Mothership — https://mothership.sg/2025/09/teenagers-fire-boon-lay-loanshark/

• Man, 44, started fire in Joo Seng home due to delusions, gets mandatory treatment order — Mothership — https://mothership.sg/2026/07/man-joo-seng-fire-mandatory-treatment-order/

• 149 road fatalities in 2025, fatal accidents involving elderly pedestrians more than doubled — Mothership — https://mothership.sg/2026/02/traffic-deaths-injuries-singapore-2025/

• Traffic Accidents Rose in 2025 — Singapore Police Force, Police Life — https://www.police.gov.sg/media-hub/police-life/2026/02/traffic-accidents-rose-in-2025

• Annual Road Traffic Situation 2025 (PDF) — Singapore Police Force — https://www.police.gov.sg/-/media/SPF/Media-Room/Statistics/Annual-Road-Traffic-Situation-2025/Annual-Road-Traffic-Situation-2025.pdf

• S'porean man, 58, crashes Porsche into Suntec City's Fountain of Wealth, gets 5 weeks' jail & 30 months' driving ban — Mothership — https://mothership.sg/2026/07/man-crash-porsche-suntec-city-jail-ban/

• Delivery driver chases down car at Kallang Way — Must Share News — https://mustsharenews.com/van-chases-car/