No, not by the standards of the county around it, and the gap is not a rounding error. Recorded crime runs about two thirds above the Cornwall rate. Violence and sexual offences account for half of everything logged, against roughly a third nationally, and that heading covers a far wider range of things than the words suggest. Fewer than one report in ten across the force area ends with anyone charged. Small town, town-centre numbers.
Police recorded 2,081 crimes in the area in the twelve months to May 2026. The published rate for that period is about 123 offences per thousand people, sitting roughly 66% above the local authority average. Both of those are published figures rather than sums anyone should try to reproduce at home, because the rate is calculated against a statistical population base that is not the same as the number of residents. The direction is not in dispute in any case.
The comparison is worth seeing in full rather than as an adjective. Cornwall as a whole records about 74 offences per thousand people over the same twelve months. Bodmin records about 123. A buyer moving from a village twenty minutes away is not imagining the difference when they notice the town feels busier at night; the recorded numbers say the same thing.
What makes this awkward is that the usual shorthand explanations are not available. The area averages roughly 3,830 people per square kilometre, which is genuinely urban density for somewhere surrounded by fields, so the town is more concentrated than the Cornwall image implies. Unemployment sits at about 3% and overcrowded households at about 3%, both low. None of those figures causes anything, and the honest position is that the tidy story people reach for is not in the data.
On what actually gets recorded, violence and sexual offences make up about 51% of crimes here against roughly 35% across England and Wales. That grouping is broad by statutory design and includes common assault without injury, which is why it tops the table almost everywhere before any local character enters the picture; a town at 51% is high within that pattern rather than outside it. The rest of the mix is close to ordinary. Anti-social behaviour runs at about 14% locally against roughly 16% nationally, criminal damage and arson at about 9% against 7%, public order at about 6% against 7%, and other theft at about 6% against 7%. Shoplifting is about 5% here against roughly 8% nationally.
Then the question people only think to ask after something has happened to them. Devon and Cornwall Police charge a suspect in about 8% of cases, against roughly 12% nationally, which places the force last among the 42 forces in England and Wales on that measure. Around 26% of cases are closed with no suspect identified at all. Those are force-wide figures covering a very large rural area, not a Bodmin statistic, and they measure the response rather than the risk. The two answer different questions and blending them tells you nothing about either. What the charge rate does tell you is what to expect from the process, which is worth knowing before you find out the hard way.
Safety is the weakest thing about this town, and no amount of Cornish scenery softens a number that sits two thirds above the county it belongs to. Where you buy inside Bodmin matters more here than in almost any other decision the town asks of you.