Avonmouth is averagely safe, which is a duller answer than its reputation deserves. People hear "docks, chemical works, motorway" and picture somewhere you lock the car twice. The crime figures decline to play along. The published rate runs close to the Bristol average, neither the horror show the industry backdrop suggests nor the sleepy village some buyers hope they have found. It is a normal working suburb with a normal working suburb's crime, and the scenery does most of the scaremongering on its own.
The numbers themselves are unshowy. The recorded crime rate sits at about 150 incidents per 1,000 people a year, set against a Bristol-wide figure of roughly 152, so Avonmouth comes in a whisker under the city as a whole. Over the past year that amounted to something in the order of 1,300 recorded crimes across the area. Read that rate as the published, like-for-like measure it is, worked out on the statisticians' own population base rather than something you can back-calculate from the resident headcount on this page. The honest headline is that Avonmouth tracks the city it belongs to almost exactly, which is a long way from the trouble spot the postcode's grim first impression implies.
None of that tells you how a single street feels at eleven at night, because a rate is an average and averages flatten the corners. What it does do is settle the big question. A place level with its own city is not a place you rule out on safety, and it is not a place you assume is pristine either. The reputation runs hotter than the data; trust the data.
The verdict is a steady middle. Avonmouth is neither noticeably dangerous nor noticeably calm, just ordinary for Bristol, and ordinary is a perfectly good answer to a question most people ask expecting the worst.