Barnehurst is about as safe as the rest of Bexley, which makes it middling. Its crime rate is a whisker above the borough's. Violence and sexual offences make up a smaller share than they do nationally. Shoplifting makes up a larger one. Buyers looking for drama will be disappointed, and so will buyers looking for a village with no crime at all.
The Metropolitan Police recorded 4,663 crimes across Barnehurst in the year from June 2025 to May 2026, a published rate of about 83 per 1,000 residents. That is roughly 2% above the Bexley average. Twelve full months is long enough that one rowdy weekend or one prolific shoplifter cannot rewrite the result.
For the London Borough of Bexley as a whole, the rate over the same twelve months was about 81 per 1,000. Put next to Barnehurst's 83, the gap is two crimes per thousand people per year. Barnehurst is high for Bexley by about as little as the measure can show.
The neighbourhood behind the numbers is suburban and fairly tightly packed. There are about 6,000 people per square kilometre on average, unemployment ran at 3% and overcrowding at 4% at the 2021 Census. These are the figures of semis, back gardens and people who go to work in the morning. None of them explains the crime rate on its own, and none needs to.
Violence and sexual offences are the largest category, at 31% of recorded crime against 35% across England and Wales. The category covers everything from serious assault to a shove with no injury, and it tops the list almost everywhere. Anti-social behaviour takes 19%, against 16% nationally, and shoplifting 11%, against 8%. Public order offences (7%), other theft (6%) and criminal damage and arson (6%) all sit within a point of the national share. The only real tilt in Barnehurst's crime mix is towards shops. A suburb with 171 of them on the business rates list gives the light-fingered a fair amount to work with. Look up the exact street on the police's own crime map, because a home next to a parade of shops and one at the end of a cul-de-sac will see different things.
What happens after a report is a question about the police, and it gets a force-wide answer. Across London, the Metropolitan Police charged a suspect in about 10% of cases in the year to May 2026, against about 12% nationally, which puts it 33rd of 42 forces. About 53% of cases closed with no suspect identified. That is the Met's record across the whole capital, not a measure of Barnehurst's streets. A stolen bike reported in Barnehurst is in the same queue as one reported anywhere else in London.
Barnehurst is an ordinary outer-London suburb on safety: no worse than its borough to any degree that matters, and no better either. The thing most likely to go missing here is stock from a shop shelf.