Bicester is about as safe as a busy market town gets, and a little less settled than the countryside around it. Crime runs slightly above the district average. Violence matches the national pattern. Anti-social behaviour comes in well under it. The outlier is goods leaving shops without passing a till.
Thames Valley Police recorded 3,784 crimes across Bicester in the year to May 2026, a published rate of about 84 per 1,000 residents. That puts the town roughly 10% above the average for Cherwell, the district it belongs to.
Across Cherwell as a whole the rate in the same year was about 76 per 1,000, so the gap between the town and its district is a handful of crimes per thousand people. The busier town scores higher than the villages and farmland that pull the district average down, and the gap is the size anyone would expect from that.
The neighbourhoods that produce those numbers are compact and working. Bicester's built-up areas average about 4,900 people per square kilometre, unemployment was about 2% at the 2021 Census, and under 3% of households were overcrowded. Those are the readings of a town where most people have a job and room to live, which makes the crime figure look less like a social problem and more like a busy town doing what busy towns do.
The mix is where Bicester shows its own shape. Violence and sexual offences make up about 35% of recorded crime here and about 35% nationally, the same share, in a broad legal category that takes in common assault without injury. Shoplifting accounts for about 22% of crime in Bicester against about 8% across England and Wales, and other theft about 10% against 7%. Anti-social behaviour runs at about 8%, half the national share of about 16%, with public order offences at about 6% against 7% and criminal damage and arson about 6% against 7%. The street-level crime map on the police website shows where reports cluster near a given postcode, and for most homes on the estates the answer will be somewhere else. Bicester's crime has always had a taste for the ceremonial over the dangerous: its volunteer militia, raised in 1804 against a feared invasion, saw its only recorded action at a twenty-first birthday party in 1806, and was afterwards regaled at one of the principal inns.
What follows a report is a separate question, answered force-wide. Thames Valley Police charges a suspect in about 9% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which places it 37th of 42 forces in England and Wales. About 37% of its cases close with no suspect identified. Those figures measure the force's casework over the year to May 2026 across its whole patch, and they say nothing about the odds of something happening on a Bicester street.
Bicester is middling on safety: a shade above its district, ordinary on violence, unusually busy with shop theft, and calmer than most towns where the evenings are concerned.