Boscastle is about as safe as an English address gets, and the gap between it and the county is not a rounding error. Sixty-nine recorded crimes across an entire year, for the entire village. A rate well under half the Cornwall figure. A settlement strung up two river valleys with a harbour at the bottom of them, where the population is small and the passing traffic is seasonal. If you are moving here for the quiet, the crime numbers are on your side.
Police recorded 69 crimes in the area in the twelve months to May 2026, which works out at a published rate of about 31 per thousand residents. That rate sits roughly 59% below the Cornwall average. Both figures are published statistics calculated on their own population bases, so the sensible thing is to read them side by side rather than to check one against the other with a calculator. The brief carries no breakdown by offence type, so anyone telling you what kind of crime this village mostly gets is guessing.
The comparison is worth seeing in full rather than as a percentage. Cornwall as a whole records about 74 crimes per thousand residents. Boscastle records about 31. That is the difference between a county containing several sizeable towns and a village where an unfamiliar car parked overnight is a conversation.
The texture behind those numbers is what you would find in most small coastal parishes. Population density averages roughly 1,190 people per square kilometre across the measured area, which reads higher than the fields around it because the boundary is drawn around the built-up part rather than the farmland. Unemployment runs at about 3%, and around 2% of households are overcrowded on the census measure. None of those figures causes the crime rate, and none of them is being offered as an explanation. They describe a small, settled, largely working-age-and-older place with very little churn in it.
What happens after a report is a separate question, and the answer is less flattering. 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 forces on that measure. Around 26% of cases were closed with no suspect identified at all. Those are force-wide figures covering everywhere from Plymouth to the Isles of Scilly, they carry no street-level signal for this village, and they say nothing about how safe Boscastle is. They answer the different question of what to expect if something does happen to you, and the honest answer is that the odds of anyone being charged are below the national norm.
Safety is the single strongest thing this village has going for it, and it is not close. The most likely thing to damage your property here has never been arrested, because it is weather.