Roughly average by the city's own standard, and busier than a market town by any other. About 132 crimes per thousand residents last year. Around 30,385 recorded incidents in the twelve months to March. Close to the Brighton and Hove local-authority average. Brighton is a city, and the numbers know it.
The headline crime rate for Brighton is about 132 incidents per thousand residents over the past twelve months, on a total of roughly 30,385 recorded incidents. The Brighton and Hove local-authority average sits at about 125 per thousand, which puts the city itself around 6% above the wider authority figure, in the tier the published statistics classify as being at the local-authority average rather than above or below it. The gap is real but modest, and it reflects the fact that the city itself carries the concentrated urban activity while the outer parts of the wider authority carry the residential quiet. The categories that drive the totals are the same categories that drive them in every urban seafront in England: anti-social behaviour, violence, criminal damage and shoplifting. These concentrate in the town-centre grid and along the entertainment corridor that runs between the piers, while the residential streets stepping back from the front, and the wards inland, carry rates that would not look out of place in a Sussex commuter town.
Both facts are true simultaneously, and neither cancels the other. The published figure counts every incident logged in the twelve-month window, and it does not distinguish between a stolen phone at three in the morning and a fight that started outside a bar, or between shoplifting from a high-street chain and a burglary on a residential street. That composition matters. A resident who lives on a Georgian square in one of the quieter wards will experience a different Brighton from a resident who lives above a chip shop on the corridor between the venues. Timing is part of the pattern: the small hours of Friday and Saturday do more work on the totals than the working weekdays, and the summer months do more than the winter, which is what happens in a resort that adds a substantial visiting population on a warm Saturday afternoon. Any local can point at the two or three streets that carry the disproportionate share, and the property market has already priced them in. The city as a whole is a city, and the neighbourhood you buy into is a neighbourhood, and those are two different questions with two different answers.
Brighton is safe enough for most residents in most wards, and it is honest about the wards where it isn't. The rate is roughly at the local-authority average, the pattern is a matter of geography and time of day, and the person who tells you otherwise is either selling something or living in the wrong postcode.