No, not on the recorded numbers, and the gap is not a rounding artefact. The town's crime rate runs about half again above the wider district it sits in. The force covering it charges a suspect in fewer cases than the national picture. A quarter of cases close with nobody identified at all. Bideford is a small town with a town-sized night economy and district-sized policing, and the figures land exactly where you would expect that combination to put them.
Police.uk records 1,785 crimes in the Bideford area in the year to May 2026, a published rate of about 81 per thousand people. That sits roughly 46% above the average for Torridge, the local authority the town anchors. The rate is published as a rate rather than worked out from the resident headcount, which matters, because the two use different population bases and the arithmetic people do in their heads on a property listings tab is usually wrong.
Put side by side, the two figures are about 81 per thousand for Bideford against about 55 per thousand for Torridge as a whole. Torridge is a large rural district with a lot of quiet in it, and Bideford is where the district goes on a Friday. Being the busiest place in a quiet area is not a scandal. It is also not nothing, and pretending otherwise is what estate agent copy is for.
The texture of the place does not read like an inner city. Population density averages roughly 4,600 people per square kilometre across the town's neighbourhoods, unemployment sits at about 3%, and around 2% of households are overcrowded. Those are ordinary small-town numbers. None of them explains the crime rate, and none of them is offered here as a cause. They are simply what the place looks like underneath the headline.
The mix is more reassuring than the rate, and it needs reading properly. Violence and sexual offences account for about 40% of recorded crime here against roughly 35% across England and Wales, a broad statutory grouping that runs from serious assault down to common assault without injury, which is why it tops the table almost everywhere. Anti-social behaviour is about 18% locally against roughly 16% nationally, close enough to call similar. Shoplifting sits at about 9% against roughly 8%, and criminal damage and arson at about 9% against roughly 7%. Public order at about 6% and other theft at about 6% both come in slightly under the national shares. The profile is a market town centre with pubs in it, not a place with an unusual category problem.
What happens after a report is a separate question, and the answer is a different kind of uncomfortable. Devon and Cornwall Police charged a suspect in about 8% of cases over the same twelve months to May 2026, against roughly 12% nationally, which ranks the force 42nd out of 42 forces in England and Wales on that measure. About 26% of cases closed with no suspect identified. That is a force-wide figure covering two counties, not Bideford's own, and it says nothing about which street anything happened on. It does answer the question people actually mean when they ask whether somewhere is safe, which is usually less about the odds of something happening and more about whether anyone does anything afterwards.
Safety is the weakest thing about Bideford by some distance, and it is the one area where the town's cheerful reputation and its recorded numbers pull hardest in opposite directions. Buy here for the estuary, the price and the space, but do it with the town centre's Friday nights factored in rather than discovered later.