Yes, and comfortably so. Crime across the town runs below the Dorset average. The one category that stands out against the national pattern is anti-social behaviour, which is nuisance rather than menace. A reported case here is more likely to end with someone charged than across England and Wales generally. Safe, in this instance, means quiet rather than sterile.
The recorded rate for the twelve months to May 2026 is 49 crimes per thousand people, covering 860 recorded offences. That sits roughly 10% below the local authority average. Both figures are published rates built from police records mapped to small statistical areas, which is worth saying because dividing the offence count by the town's resident population gives a different and wrong answer. The two use different population bases and were never meant to be reconciled on the back of an envelope.
The comparison is more useful with both numbers on the table. Dorset as a whole records around 55 crimes per thousand people over the same twelve months, against 49 in Blandford. That is a real gap rather than a rounding artefact, and it holds across a county that includes a good deal of coastline, several considerably larger towns, and the summer visitor traffic that comes with both.
The neighbourhood texture behind those numbers is unremarkable in the way that tends to produce them. Density averages around 4,760 people per square kilometre across the area's neighbourhoods, which is town rather than city. Unemployment stands at about 2%, and about 2% of households are overcrowded on the Census measure. None of that explains the crime rate on its own, and anyone who tells you it does is selling something, but it describes the kind of place this is: settled, working, not under pressure.
On the mix, violence and sexual offences make up around 38% of recorded crime here against about 35% nationally, which is close to the national pattern rather than a local problem. That category is also the biggest one almost everywhere, because it is a broad statutory grouping that sweeps in common assault without injury alongside far more serious offences, so the headline share tells you less than its size suggests. Anti-social behaviour is the genuine local outlier at around 23% against roughly 16% nationally. Criminal damage and arson sit at about 10% against around 7%. Shoplifting runs slightly lower than the national share at around 7% against about 8%, and other theft and public order both come in below the national pattern too. The shape is a town where the friction is noise and low-level nuisance, not acquisitive crime.
What happens after a report is a separate question, decided force-wide rather than street by street. Dorset Police charges a suspect in about 14% of cases, against roughly 12% nationally over the same twelve months, which puts the force twelfth out of the 42 forces in England and Wales. That is a measure of investigative outcome, not of how safe your street is, and the two should never be read as one number. The honest counterweight sits in the same dataset: around 35% of cases close with no suspect identified at all. Better than most forces manage still leaves a substantial share of reports going nowhere, which is the part of the criminal justice system nobody puts on a brochure.
Safety is one of the stronger arguments for living here. A town that records meaningfully less crime than its own county, with nuisance rather than theft as its defining complaint, is offering something most buyers are quietly shopping for and rarely say out loud.