Safe enough, and slightly noisier than Wiltshire likes to admit. The recorded crime rate sits above the county average rather than below it. The gap is real but modest. The mix looks like a town centre with a garrison attached, not a place with a problem. Amesbury is the sort of town where the numbers are worse than the reputation and the reputation is still basically right.
Over the twelve months to May 2026, police.uk recorded 928 crimes across the neighbourhoods covering Amesbury, giving a published rate of roughly 71 crimes per 1,000 residents. That sits about 14% above the Wiltshire average. It is worth being precise about what that means: not double, not a different category of place, but a measurable step up from a county whose average is dragged downward by a great many very quiet villages.
The comparison is more useful with both numbers side by side. Wiltshire as a whole records roughly 62 crimes per 1,000 residents across a population of around 510,000. Amesbury records roughly 71. A town with a high street, a bus route and several thousand people in one place will always out-record a parish with a postbox and a church, and that is most of what the nine-point difference is describing.
The neighbourhood texture behind those numbers is unremarkable in the ways that matter. Unemployment sits at around 2%, overcrowded households at around 2%, and the average population density across the area works out at around 4,370 people per square kilometre, which is town-shaped rather than city-shaped. None of those figures explains the crime rate, and none of them is offered as an explanation. They are simply what the place looks like: employed, not crowded, built at ordinary town density on the edge of a very large amount of empty Salisbury Plain.
The mix is closer to the national pattern than the headline suggests. Violence and sexual offences make up around 42% of recorded crime here against roughly 35% across England and Wales, which sounds worse than it is: that category is a broad statutory grouping running from common assault without injury upward, and it is the largest category almost everywhere. Anti-social behaviour is around 19% locally against roughly 16% nationally, public order around 9% against roughly 7%, and criminal damage and arson around 8% against roughly 7%. Shoplifting runs around 5% against roughly 8% nationally, so the town has less of it than the average. The pattern across all of that is the same story told five times: a few points up on the disorder categories, a few points down on the acquisitive ones.
What happens after a report is a force-wide question rather than an Amesbury one. Wiltshire Police charge a suspect in around 10% of recorded crimes, against roughly 12% nationally, which puts the force 32nd out of 42 in England and Wales. Around 34% of cases close with no suspect identified at all. That is not a measure of how safe your street is, and it should not be read as one, but it is the honest answer to the question everyone actually asks after a break-in, which is whether anyone gets caught.
Middling on safety, with the emphasis on middling rather than on the fourteen percent. Amesbury records more crime than its county and less than its size and its garrison would lead you to expect, and the gap between those two facts is where most people's experience of living here actually sits.