Frankston has had a complicated relationship with its own crime statistics for thirty years. There are stretches of the city centre that anyone who lived there in the 1990s would barely recognise today, and others where the same conversations about safety, late-night drinking and street disorder are still being had. Our newsroom wanted to put together a sober profile of how Frankston is policed in 2026, what the data actually shows, and where the local police service area sits in the broader Melbourne south-east picture.
Jack Renton has been working the police-rounds beat in the south-east for several years now and has spent time on this piece talking with current and former officers, council safety staff, and people who run businesses in the Frankston activity centre. The aim is descriptive, not editorial. Frankston is one of the most-watched local government areas in the state for crime statistics, partly because the data is genuinely interesting and partly because the public conversation about it has been running for so long that any new release lands in a pre-existing narrative.
The local government area in numbers
The City of Frankston covers about 130 square kilometres on the eastern shore of Port Phillip Bay, with a population just over 145,000. It is one of the larger LGAs in Greater Melbourne by population. The area takes in the Frankston activity centre itself, the residential suburbs of Karingal, Frankston North, Seaford, Skye and Langwarrin, and a substantial industrial belt along Frankston-Dandenong Road.
Crime Statistics Agency data, which is published quarterly and freely available on the agency’s website, places Frankston in the upper portion of metropolitan LGAs for total recorded incidents. Some of that reflects the genuine local picture. Some of it reflects the fact that activity centres act as collection points for offending that draws people in from neighbouring LGAs — Mornington Peninsula, Casey, Kingston. The same dynamic is true of Dandenong, Footscray and the Melbourne CBD.
When the data is broken down per capita, Frankston typically sits in the top decile of metropolitan LGAs for property offences, particularly theft from motor vehicle, and around the metropolitan median for offences against the person. Family violence rates have tracked broadly with the Greater Melbourne average, with the usual caution that family-violence reporting rates reflect both incidence and reporting culture, and the two can move independently.
The Frankston Police Service Area
The Frankston Police Service Area sits within the Southern Metro Region of Victoria Police. The area covers Frankston, Mornington Peninsula and parts of the Casey-Cardinia interface, depending on the particular operational structure of the time. The service area is led by an Inspector responsible for the Frankston police complex on Fletcher Road, with subsidiary stations at Hastings, Rosebud and Mornington.
The Frankston station itself is staffed around the clock and houses uniform response, the criminal investigation unit, the family violence investigation unit, the proactive policing unit, and a youth resource officer. The highway patrol component for the area is co-located. Specialist support — major collision investigation, the dog squad, the public order response team — is drawn from regional and state resources as needed.
One feature that distinguishes Frankston from comparable LGAs is the presence of Protective Services Officers at Frankston and Seaford railway stations. The PSO program, established in 2011, places armed protective services officers at metropolitan train stations from 6pm until last train. They are not police officers in the full sense — their powers are more limited and confined to railway property and the surrounding designated area — but their visible presence has reshaped the night-time atmosphere around station precincts across Melbourne, including Frankston.
Community-policing programs
Frankston has been a testbed for several community-policing approaches over the years. The Frankston Safety Precinct work, led by the City of Frankston in partnership with police and other agencies, brought together CCTV expansion, lighting upgrades, street-activation programs and targeted enforcement in the activity centre. The work followed a familiar Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design playbook — the international evidence base for which sits at the stronger end of the urban-safety literature.
The Embedded Youth Outreach Program — a partnership between Victoria Police, Department of Justice and Community Safety youth justice and a local community organisation — has run in Frankston in some form for several years. The model pairs a uniformed officer with a youth worker on patrol, with the explicit aim of de-escalation and connection-to-service rather than arrest. The evaluations of similar programs elsewhere suggest modest but real reductions in subsequent contact with the criminal justice system among the cohort that engages.
The Neighbourhood Policing model, rolled out across Victoria over the last several years, has changed how local response teams operate in suburbs like Frankston North and Karingal. The approach is meant to anchor a small number of officers to a defined geographic patch over an extended period, building local knowledge and relationships rather than rotating officers through. The evidence on neighbourhood policing internationally is mixed, but most studies show some positive effect on community confidence even where the effect on offending is harder to detect.
The activity centre and night-time economy
The Frankston activity centre concentrates a substantial share of the LGA’s recorded offending, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights. Liquor-licensed venues along Wells Street, Bay Street and the surrounding precinct have been the focus of repeated regulatory and policing attention.
The Liquor Control Reform Act gives the regulator — Liquor Control Victoria — a range of powers including saturation declarations, accord agreements and licensing conditions. The Frankston Liquor Accord has operated for many years and in its more active periods has produced measurable changes in late-night assault rates. As with all such accords, the effect depends heavily on consistent enforcement and on the willingness of venue operators to maintain standards even when that costs them turnover.
The Frankston Pier and beach foreshore are a separate operational pattern. Summer brings substantial visitor numbers and a corresponding lift in foreshore policing. Maritime safety, drowning prevention and beach-related incident response are coordinated with Life Saving Victoria and water police.
What the data trends show
Looking at the last several years of Crime Statistics Agency data for Frankston, a few trends stand out:
- Theft from motor vehicle has remained stubbornly high, in line with the metropolitan trend. Vehicles left unlocked or with valuables visible account for a disproportionate share.
- Residential aggravated burglary has fluctuated with the broader Melbourne pattern, with surges typically tied to identified groups operating across multiple LGAs.
- Drug-related offending has shifted in composition over the decade, reflecting state-wide changes in the methamphetamine and pharmaceutical-opioid markets.
- Family violence reports have continued the long upward trend that began with the 2014–16 Royal Commission and the cultural shift in reporting that followed.
- Public-place assaults in the activity centre have generally declined from their late-2000s peak, though they remain higher than the metropolitan median.
None of those trends is unique to Frankston. They mirror what is happening across Melbourne’s major activity centres. What makes Frankston a useful case study is the long public conversation about safety, the relatively well-funded local-government safety work, and the willingness of agencies to publish what they are doing.
If you have information about offending in the Frankston area, contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000. For non-urgent police matters, the Police Assistance Line is on 131 444. In an emergency, dial triple zero. Family-violence support is available through Safe Steps on 1800 015 188 and 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732.
