Less safe than the postcards imply. Bath records more crime per head than the wider district it sits in. Shoplifting runs well above the national share. So does public order. None of that makes a Georgian terrace dangerous, but a city that pulls in millions of visitors generates the crime figures of a city that pulls in millions of visitors, and the honest version is that Bath is a tourist economy wearing a residential face.
The published rate for the twelve months to May 2026 is around 110 recorded crimes per thousand residents, from around 11,500 recorded offences. That sits roughly 22% above the local authority average. It is a rate published on statistical-area populations rather than something to be worked out from the headline count, and it describes the city as a whole rather than any particular street.
The comparison is worth seeing as two numbers rather than one adjective. Bath and North East Somerset as a whole records around 90 crimes per thousand residents over the same period. Bath itself records around 110. The district includes a great deal of countryside, villages like Wellow, Swainswick and Hinton Charterhouse among them, and averaging a city into a rural authority always flatters the city's neighbours rather than the city.
Some texture on what kind of place produces those numbers. Population density averages around 6,300 people per square kilometre across the area's neighbourhoods, which is properly urban. Unemployment runs at around 2%, and overcrowded households at around 3%. Those are the figures of a prosperous, tightly-packed city rather than a struggling one, and they are offered as description rather than explanation.
The mix explains the gap better than the headline does. Violence and sexual offences make up around 34% of recorded crime here against around 35% nationally, so on the largest category Bath is essentially at the national shape. That category is a broad statutory grouping including common assault without injury, and quoting it bare makes anywhere sound worse than it is. Anti-social behaviour runs at around 16% against around 16% nationally, another near-match. Criminal damage and arson at around 6% sits slightly below the national 7%. The two categories that genuinely stand out are shoplifting, at around 13% locally against around 8% nationally, and public order at around 10% against around 7%. Retail theft and drunken argument, in other words. Bath's crime problem is substantially a city-centre-and-night-time problem, and the residential streets are not where the volume comes from.
On what happens after a report, Avon and Somerset Constabulary charges a suspect in around 11% of cases, against around 12% nationally, which places the force 24th of 42. Around 30% of cases are closed with no suspect identified. That is a force-wide figure covering a large area rather than anything specific to Bath, and it answers a different question from the crime rate: not how likely something is to happen, but how likely anyone is to be held to account for it. On both counts the force sits close to the middle of the national pack.
Safety is the weaker end of Bath's profile, and not because the streets feel threatening. It is because a small, dense, heavily-visited city concentrates a lot of shopfront and pavement crime into a small footprint, and the arithmetic does not distinguish between a stolen jumper on a Saturday and anything that would actually change where you buy.