Yes, Chalford is safe, and comfortably so by the standards of the district around it. Recorded crime runs well below the Stroud average. Hardly anyone is out of work. Hardly anyone is crammed into an overcrowded home. The thing most likely to wake you here is a car taking a hairpin too fast.
Police figures put Chalford at about 28 recorded crimes per 1,000 residents in the year from June 2025 to May 2026, roughly 38% below the average for the Stroud council area. That covers 340 recorded crimes across the area over those twelve months. The published rate uses a statistical population base of its own, so it is best read as it stands.
To put the two side by side, the Stroud council area as a whole runs at about 46 crimes per 1,000 residents, against Chalford's 28. Stroud is hardly a crime capital either, so Chalford is below the average of an area that was already low.
Chalford's density averages about 2,500 people per square kilometre across its small statistical areas. That figure is pushed up by the tight terraces on the hillsides, while the lanes between them stay thinly built. Unemployment is about 1% and about 1% of households are overcrowded. They describe a well-off settlement where people own and stay, and they explain nothing on their own about why the crime count is low.
By category, violence and sexual offences make up about 37% of Chalford's recorded crime, against about 35% nationally, which is roughly the national pattern. That category is a broad legal grouping that includes common assault where nobody was hurt, so it tops the list in most places. Anti-social behaviour is about 24% here against 16% nationally, criminal damage and arson about 8% against 7%, and burglary about 6% against 4%. "Other crime" accounts for about 7% against about 2%. With only 340 crimes in the year, a handful of incidents can move any of those shares by several points, so the mix describes one year's records and may look different next year. If a particular lane matters to you, the police's street-level crime map shows where the reports cluster, and that is a better guide than any category share.
What happens after a report is a separate question, and the answer covers the whole of Gloucestershire. Gloucestershire Constabulary charges a suspect in about 9% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which places it 39th of 42 forces. About 33% of its cases close with no suspect identified. Those are the force's own outcome figures, built from the eight months it reported over the year from June 2025 to May 2026. They describe how the police handle a crime once it happens, which is a different question from how often crime happens here. Chalford does well on the first question, and Gloucestershire does poorly on the second.
Safety is one of Chalford's real strengths. It is a low-crime village inside a low-crime district, and most residents will rarely have reason to test how the county's police deal with a report.