Benson is a safe place to live, and its crime rate is well below the district's. About 35 crimes are recorded per thousand residents. That is roughly a quarter below the South Oxfordshire figure. Unemployment is close to nil. The worst thing likely to happen on most streets is an argument about parking that never reaches the police.
Thames Valley Police recorded 224 crimes across Benson in the twelve months from June 2025 to May 2026, a published rate of about 35 per 1,000 residents. That is roughly 28% below the average for South Oxfordshire. The district is hardly a crime hotspot to begin with, so Benson is the safer end of a place that was already safe.
South Oxfordshire as a whole recorded about 49 crimes per 1,000 residents over the same year, against Benson's 35. The gap is real, though in a village this size a few incidents either way move the rate.
Benson has about 1,700 people per square kilometre on average, unemployment of about 2% and overcrowding of about 1%. That makes it a compact, mostly owner-occupied village of family houses with room to spare inside them. Those figures describe the place. They do not explain its crime rate, and nobody should read them as if they did.
Among the six largest categories, violence and sexual offences made up about 47% of Benson's recorded crime, against about 35% across England and Wales. That police category is broad, running from serious assault to common assault with no injury, and it is the biggest category almost everywhere. Anti-social behaviour was about 10% here, against 16% nationally. Other theft was about 10% against 7%, criminal damage and arson about 7% against 7%, burglary about 7% against 4%, and shoplifting about 5% against 8%. With 224 crimes in a year, two or three incidents can move a share by several points, so the mix describes last year's handful of cases and could look different next year. Benson's shoplifting share runs below the national one, which is easy to manage when the village has so few shops to steal from.
After a crime is reported, Thames Valley Police charges a suspect in about 9% of cases, against about 12% nationally. That puts the force 37th of 42 in England and Wales, and about 37% of its cases are closed with no suspect identified. Those are force-wide figures covering a large region, so they say nothing about how safe Benson is. They describe what tends to happen once something has already gone wrong. To see what was reported near a particular house, the police's public crime map shows incidents street by street.
Benson is very safe, among the safest places in South Oxfordshire.