Chatham is less safe than the rest of Medway. Its crime rate runs about a fifth above the council-area average. Most of the gap comes from nuisance, not violence. Kent's police charge suspects more often than most forces. The town is louder than it is dangerous, but the numbers still don't let it off.
In the year to May 2026, police.uk recorded 12,474 crimes in Chatham, a published rate of around 132 per 1,000 residents. That's roughly 23% above the local-authority average. Chatham is the busiest part of a busy conurbation, with the town centre, the bus station and the railway junction, and busy places show up in crime figures. That explains the number without excusing it.
The comparison is Medway as a whole, at about 108 crimes per 1,000 residents over the same period. Chatham's 132 is clearly above that. It's worse than its neighbours, not in a different league from them. Reputations tend to lose the difference between those two things.
Chatham is a dense town, with about 7,040 people per square kilometre on average. Unemployment is about 3% and about 5% of households are overcrowded. That's a crowded, working town where most adults have a job and most homes have enough room. None of those figures explains the crime rate by itself, but they describe the streets it comes from.
The mix is where the reputation and the record part ways. Violence and sexual offences make up about 36% of recorded crime, against about 35% nationally, so Chatham matches the rest of the country there. That category covers everything from serious assault to common assault without injury, and it's the biggest category almost everywhere. The real difference is anti-social behaviour, at about 22% of incidents against 16% nationally. Criminal damage and arson is about 8% against 7%. Shoplifting is level at about 8% in both. Other theft, at about 6%, and public order offences, at about 4%, both sit below the national shares of about 7%. So Chatham's excess is mostly noise, nuisance and broken things. It's the kind of crime that keeps a street awake more than it puts people in hospital.
After a report, the numbers belong to the whole force. Kent Police charges a suspect in about 16% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which ranks it 6th of the 42 forces over the year to May 2026. That's a Kent-wide figure, not Chatham's own, and it says nothing about how often crime happens here. The other side of it is that about 36% of cases across the force close with nobody identified. If your shed gets broken into, the odds of an arrest aren't in your favour.
On safety, Chatham is below par for Medway. It's no emergency, but it's a real enough gap that a buyer should walk the exact street after dark before signing anything.