Yes, and not marginally. Braunton records crime at roughly half the rate of the wider district around it. Almost nobody here is out of work. Overcrowded housing is close to nonexistent. The question worth asking in this village is not whether something happens to you. It is whether anyone is ever charged for it.
Police.uk recorded 414 crimes in Braunton over the year to May 2026, which works out at about 37 per 1,000 people. That published rate sits roughly 49% below the North Devon average. Both of those are published figures rather than a sum done here, and the rate uses its own statistical population base, so it will not reconcile against the village headcount if anyone tries.
The comparison lands harder with both numbers side by side. Braunton is at about 37 recorded crimes per 1,000 people. North Devon as a whole runs at about 73 per 1,000. That is the sort of gap you normally see between a village and a town centre, and Braunton is on the comfortable end of it.
The surrounding texture explains what kind of place produces those numbers without pretending to explain the crime itself. Unemployment sits at about 2%. Overcrowded households run at about 1%. Density averages roughly 2,860 people per square kilometre across the neighbourhoods, which is denser than the word village suggests, because the housing here is packed into a compact settlement with farmland doing the wide-open bit around it. Braunton is not empty. It is contained.
The mix needs handling carefully, because 414 crimes spread across 13 categories is a small enough base that a handful of incidents shifts a share by several points, and nobody should read the following as a settled characteristic of the place. Anti-social behaviour makes up about 16% of recorded crime here, exactly the national share. Violence and sexual offences account for about 46% against about 35% nationally, and that category is a broad statutory grouping that sweeps in common assault without injury, so it looks alarming everywhere it is quoted bare. Criminal damage and arson sit at about 12% against about 7% nationally. Shoplifting runs lower than the national share, about 5% against about 8%, which is what happens when there are fewer shops to lift from. Other theft is roughly in line at about 6% against about 7%.
Then there is the part nobody puts in the brochure. Devon and Cornwall Police charge a suspect in about 8% of cases, against about 12% nationally, over the same twelve months to May 2026. The force ranks last of the 42 forces in England and Wales on that measure. About 26% of cases close with nobody identified at all. That is a force-wide figure, made by decisions taken well above the level of any Braunton street, and it answers a completely different question from how much crime happens here. Low crime and low charge rates are not in tension. They just mean the odds of something happening are small, and the odds of a resolution afterwards are also small.
Safety is one of Braunton's genuine strengths, the sort of number that quietly justifies the price of the house. Whether the criminal justice system on the other end of the phone matches it is a separate matter entirely, and one the village has no say in.