Camberwell is safer than the borough around it, and noticeably so. Its crime rate comes in well under the Southwark figure. Burglary is close to normal. Pickpocketing and phone snatching are the outlier. It is a busy patch of inner London that behaves better than its neighbours, with one bad habit.
The Metropolitan Police recorded 11,829 crimes in Camberwell in the year to May 2026, a published rate of about 131 per 1,000 residents. That is roughly 17% below the average for the local authority. For an area this busy, that is a respectable result.
Set side by side, Southwark as a whole runs at about 158 crimes per 1,000 residents over the same twelve months, against Camberwell's 131. The borough's busier corners are producing the extra, and Camberwell is not where most of it comes from.
The setting matters for how those numbers feel. Camberwell packs in about 17,900 people per square kilometre on average, unemployment is about 5% and about 15% of households are overcrowded. That is dense inner-city living, with a lot of people sharing pavements, buses and stairwells. None of those figures explains the crime rate on its own, and they say more about how full the place is than about who is doing what.
The mix is where Camberwell has a character. Violence and sexual offences make up about 27% of recorded crime here, against about 35% across England and Wales, so the biggest category is smaller than usual. Anti-social behaviour is about 21% against 16% nationally. Other theft is about 8% against 7%, vehicle crime about 6% against 5%, and burglary about 5% against 4%, all close to the national pattern. The one that stands out is theft from the person, at about 8% of recorded crime here against about 2% nationally. Thieves here are much more interested in the phone than in the house it lives in. The police's street-level crime map is worth a look for the roads around a specific address, since a rate for the whole area can hide a busy junction.
What happens after a report is a separate question, and the answer is set across London. The Metropolitan Police charges a suspect in about 10% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which puts it 33rd of 42 forces in England and Wales, and about 53% of its cases close with no suspect identified. Those are force-wide figures for the whole of the capital. Camberwell's lower crime rate does nothing to improve its odds of seeing someone charged, because those odds are set in a spreadsheet covering every borough.
Camberwell is a fairly safe place to live by inner London standards and safer than the borough it belongs to. Keep the phone in your pocket at the bus stop and the rest of the numbers are on your side.