Not as safe as the countryside wrapped around it, no. Recorded crime runs about a third above the wider district's rate. Around eighty offences per thousand people across a year. Most of the categories sit close to the national pattern once you actually look at them. Andover is not a frightening town, it is simply the place where a rural district's crime gets counted.
The police.uk record for the twelve months to May 2026 puts the area at about 82 crimes per 1,000 people, from 4,508 recorded offences. Both are published figures rather than an estimate, and the rate is worked out against the statistical-area populations the police use, not against the resident headcount, so the count and the rate are not each other's arithmetic no matter how tempting the sum looks.
The comparison is worth seeing with both numbers in view. Test Valley, the district Andover sits inside, runs at about 62 crimes per 1,000 over the same twelve months. Andover's 82 against the district's 62 is the entire story of the gap, and it is a town-versus-countryside gap rather than a Hampshire-versus-everywhere-else one. Villages with a postbox and a bus twice a day do not generate incident logs.
Some texture for what kind of place produces those numbers. The area averages about 4,500 people per square kilometre across its small statistical areas, unemployment sits at about 2%, and about 3% of households are overcrowded. None of those figures causes the crime rate, and none of them should be read as though it does. They describe a working town with people in jobs and houses that are not overloaded, which is useful company for a crime figure that usually arrives on its own.
The mix is where alarm normally sets in, and mostly should not. Violence and sexual offences account for about 47% of recorded crime here against about 35% across England and Wales, and that heading is a broad statutory grouping which takes in common assault without injury, so it never means what a nervous reader assumes it means. Anti-social behaviour runs about 15% locally against about 16% nationally, public order about 8% against about 7%, criminal damage and arson about 6% against about 7%, shoplifting about 6% against about 8%, other theft about 5% against about 7%. Set beside the national shares, most of Andover's categories come in level or lower, and the violence heading is the one carrying the difference.
Then there is what happens after you pick up the phone, which is a separate question from how safe the street is and gets blended with it constantly. Hampshire Constabulary charges a suspect in about 9% of cases against about 12% nationally, placing the force 38th of 42. About 35% of cases close with nobody identified at all. Those are force-wide figures covering a large area, not a signal about any particular road, and they answer the question people are too polite to ask out loud: probably not, and reasonably quickly.
Safety is the weakest part of Andover's case, and the record does not let anyone pretend otherwise. Nothing in it describes a town to avoid, but it does describe one where you look at the individual road, read the mix rather than the headline, and accept that the parishes outside the town will always photograph better on this particular measure.