Yes. Bourton-on-the-Water is a safe village, a little calmer than the district around it. Recorded crime runs below the Cotswold average. Unemployment is close to zero. Hardly anyone lives in an overcrowded home. Its reputation as somewhere peaceful turns out to be mostly earned.
Police records put Bourton's crime rate at about 36 per 1,000 residents in the year to May 2026, roughly 10% below the local-authority average, from 166 recorded crimes over those twelve months. That is a low count for a village that has lived off visitors since the 1920s and spends every summer hosting people who do not live there.
Across Cotswold District as a whole, the published rate for the same year was about 40 per 1,000. So the comparison is 36 against 40. The difference is modest and points the right way, and it falls well short of any bragging rights.
The streets producing these numbers are residential, with a population density of about 2,070 people per square kilometre in the built-up village, unemployment of about 2% and about 2% of households overcrowded. It is a comfortable, roomy, mostly employed place, which is the kind of area that tends to give the police little to write up.
On the breakdown, violence and sexual offences make up about 37% of recorded crime here against 35% nationally, a near-match. That category is the biggest almost everywhere and covers a wide legal range, down to common assault with no injury. Anti-social behaviour is about 18% against 16% nationally, other theft 8% against 7%, and vehicle crime 5%, level with the national share. The one gap worth mentioning is criminal damage and arson, at about 11% here against 7% nationally. The totals are small enough, though, that a few incidents move any of these shares by several points, so one bad weekend could account for that gap and it may well not show up again next year.
Once a crime is reported, charging is decided by Gloucestershire Constabulary across the whole county, so the figures that matter are the force's. It charges a suspect in about 9% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which ranks it 39th of 42 forces in England and Wales for that measure, and about 33% of its cases close with no suspect identified. Those figures cover twelve months to May 2026 with eight months reported, and they say nothing about how safe Bourton is. They describe what happens after something goes wrong, and on that the county force has more to answer for than the village does.
Bourton-on-the-Water is one of the safer villages in the district. It is a real strength of the place, and even the gaps in the breakdown are the size a few bored teenagers could make.