The official data from the Annual Internal Security Report (RASI), Pordata and INE disprove the claims by the Chega party about an alleged breakdown of public order in Portugal. A parliamentarian from André Ventura's party recently stated that there were increasingly more "people being slashed" in the country, a claim that collides with the technical numbers from police forces.
In 2024, police forces recorded 354,878 criminal reports, representing a 4.6% decrease compared to the 371,995 crimes recorded in 2023. Violent and serious crime remained at 14,398 cases, a value equivalent to that recorded in 2019, the period prior to the pandemic. The historical comparison is even more enlightening: residential burglaries with forced entry dropped from 16,186 occurrences in 2015 to 7,881 in 2024, and pickpocketing fell from 14,443 to 6,919 in the same period.
Regarding homicides, Portugal recorded 89 occurrences in 2024, of which 23 in the context of domestic violence, remaining below one homicide per 100,000 inhabitants. More than 65% of the complaints filed with authorities stem from property crimes without direct violence and computer fraud, which indicates that crime in the country is dominated by distance-based property offenses.
The variations in total records have been driven mainly by digital crimes, not by street confrontations. Card abuse, cyber payments and unauthorized access exceeded 10,000 annual complaints, reflecting the transition of economic activities to electronic platforms. Experts in criminal sociology warn that citizens' security must be assessed with technical rigor and empirical evidence, not with alarmist narratives.
