Cheddar is safe, and the numbers back that up rather than flatter it. Recorded crime runs at about seventy offences per thousand people over the last year, which sits close to a quarter below the wider Somerset rate. A little over five hundred incidents were logged across the twelve months, most of them the low-drama stuff a rural village throws off. The real menace on a summer afternoon is a coachload of visitors trying to reverse near the gorge. This is a place where the caves are more dangerous than the people.
On the published figures, the crime rate lands at roughly seventy per thousand residents across Cheddar's area, measured over the year to spring. That comes in about twenty-three percent below the Somerset average, which is a genuine gap and not a rounding wobble. Across the same twelve months a little over five hundred offences were recorded in total. For a village that pulls in a steady stream of people to its gorge and caves, holding well under the county rate is quietly impressive, because visitor footfall usually drags the numbers the other way rather than down. The headline is an honest one: this is a low-crime patch of a fairly low-crime county.
It also fits the shape of the place. A village where roughly three-quarters of homes are owner-occupied and the median resident is closing on fifty tends not to generate much bother after dark, mostly because there isn't a great deal of after-dark to generate it. The trouble that does get recorded is the ordinary background hum of any settled community, not a pattern that should change where you park your car or how you walk home.
So yes, Cheddar is a safe area, comfortably so, and not by a whisker. You lock the door here out of habit rather than fear, and the biggest threat to your afternoon is the weather and the traffic, not the crime.