Bere Alston is safe, and not in the way every village claims to be. Crime here runs well below the West Devon average. Roughly a hundred recorded offences across an entire year. That is a place where one bad fortnight would be visible in the annual figures. Whatever you are taking a risk on by moving here, it is not the crime.
Over the twelve months to May 2026, police.uk recorded 107 crimes in the area, a rate of about 34 per thousand residents. That sits roughly 27% below the West Devon average. Both of those are published figures calculated on the police's own statistical population base, which is not the same as the resident count, so anyone dividing one by the other at home will get a different number and the wrong idea.
The comparison is worth seeing in full rather than as a direction of travel. West Devon as a whole runs at 47 crimes per thousand residents. Bere Alston runs at about 34. West Devon is not a rough district by any measure, so being comfortably under its average puts the village toward the quiet end of an already quiet part of the country.
The texture behind those numbers is unremarkable in the way that tends to produce them. The built-up part of the village runs at roughly 2,569 people per square kilometre, unemployment sits at about 1%, and about 1% of households are overcrowded. None of that is offered as a cause of anything. It is simply what the place is: a small, settled, low-churn village where most people know which car belongs on which drive.
The mix of what gets recorded needs handling with care, because 107 crimes in a year is a small enough base that a handful of incidents moves any share by several points. On that basis, violence and sexual offences accounted for about 52% of recorded crime against roughly 35% across England and Wales. That category is a broad statutory grouping that includes common assault without injury, and it is the largest category almost everywhere, so a bare percentage from it makes any village on earth sound like a war zone. Criminal damage and arson came to about 14% locally against roughly 7% nationally, and burglary about 7% against roughly 4%. Anti-social behaviour ran the other way, about 10% locally against roughly 16% nationally. Read all of that as one year's snapshot in a very small sample rather than a settled trait of the place.
What happens after a report is a separate question from how safe the streets are, and the answer is less comfortable. Devon and Cornwall Police charged a suspect in about 8% of cases over the same twelve months, against roughly 12% nationally, which places the force 42nd out of 42. About 26% of cases were closed with no suspect identified at all. That is a force-wide picture rather than anything happening on a particular lane, and it says nothing about your chances of being a victim here. It says a fair amount about what to expect if you are.
Safety is the strongest thing this village has going for it, and the numbers are not close. Bere Alston is somewhere you can leave the shed unlocked, then lock it anyway, because the odds of needing to are just not where the anxiety comes from.