If you had to name the one Montreal neighbourhood you'd think twice about walking through alone at night, which one comes to mind?
That's the question MTL Blog asked our Facebook audience earlier this month, and the response was bigger than we expected. More than 500 people chimed in with their pick, ranging from personal anecdotes from times they felt unsafe in the city to broader takes on entire boroughs.
A real pattern emerged once we looked through the responses: the same handful of neighbourhoods kept surfacing again and again.
What people said
- Montreal North
- Downtown / Ville-Marie
- Saint-Michel
- Hochelaga-Maisonneuve (tied with Saint-Michel)
- Rivière-des-Prairies (RDP)
Montreal North led the way, and it wasn't particularly close. Commenters brought it up constantly, frequently pairing it with Saint-Michel or Rivière-des-Prairies in the same breath, as if the three neighbourhoods formed one general area of concern in people's minds.
Saint-Michel and Hochelaga-Maisonneuve followed close behind on their own, and downtown, or Ville-Marie more broadly, came up often too, usually tied to nightlife, tourists, and the crowds that gather around transit hubs rather than any specific street or block.
Parc-Extension and Rivière-des-Prairies got a fair number of mentions as well, and NDG, Côte-des-Neiges, and Centre-Sud each picked up a scattering of their own.
St-Henri and Pointe-Saint-Charles made the list too, though mostly as callbacks rather than current concerns. Several commenters went out of their way to specify that they meant those neighbourhoods were unsafe decades ago, not today.
And plenty of people pushed back on the question altogether, arguing that Montreal holds up well against other Canadian cities. Winnipeg and downtown Vancouver at night both came up more than once as the kind of place that actually earns the label.
What the SPVM's numbers show
The SPVM's public safety dashboard tracks incidents in a handful of categories: offences resulting in death, break-ins, mischief, theft of or from a motor vehicle, and armed robbery. Combined, those categories add up to roughly 12,000 incidents across the island so far in 2026.
SPVM crime map (updated July 2026)SPVM
Downtown and the Ville-Marie core show the heaviest concentration of incidents by a wide margin. Beyond downtown, the next-largest clusters sit in the city's north end, particularly around Montreal North, Rivière-des-Prairies, and the Villeray-Saint-Michel-Parc-Extension corridor.
As for the bigger picture, in 2024, travel insurance experts Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection ranked Montreal among the world's top safest cities for travel. It was also deemed the safest city to visit in the Americas.
Meanwhile, local crime figures indicate that 2026 is tracking at or below the same levels as 2022 through 2025 for most of the year so far. The one exception is July, which shows a steep drop-off on the chart, but that's simply because the month isn't finished yet.
None of this is to say perception and data always line up perfectly, or that a Facebook comments section doubles as a crime report. But when hundreds of Montrealers and the city's own numbers are pointing to a lot of the same places, it might be worth paying attention to.
