Chertsey is reasonably safe, though it records more crime than the rest of its borough. The published rate runs at about a hundred crimes for every thousand residents. That is nearly a fifth above the Runnymede average. Violence and public order make up a bigger slice than they do nationally. The last time anyone properly sacked the town, the Danes did it and the abbey had to be built again.
Police.uk records put Chertsey's crime rate at about 103 per 1,000 residents in the year from June 2025 to May 2026, with 2,009 crimes recorded over those twelve months. That rate is about 18% above the average for Runnymede as a whole. Both are published figures for the same twelve months. Look up the exact street on the police.uk map for that year, because a town-wide rate hides which roads the reports actually came from.
Set side by side, Chertsey's rate of about 103 per 1,000 compares with about 87 per 1,000 across Runnymede. The gap is real, and it is the gap between a town centre and a borough that also contains a lot of green belt, villages and the grounds of Virginia Water. High for Runnymede is the fair description, and Runnymede is a gentle yardstick.
Chertsey is a fairly dense place, at about 4,390 people per square kilometre on average across its neighbourhoods. Unemployment is about 3%, and about 4% of households are overcrowded. Those numbers describe a compact, mostly working town with little crowding, and none of them explains the crime rate on its own.
Violence and sexual offences made up about 44% of Chertsey's recorded crime in the year to May 2026, against about 35% across England and Wales. The category is a broad legal grouping that runs from serious assault down to common assault without injury, and it is the largest one almost everywhere, so the gap matters more than the headline share. Public order offences were about 10% against 7% nationally, and criminal damage and arson about 8% against 7%. Anti-social behaviour, at about 14% against 16% nationally, came in slightly under the national share. The mix leans towards the kind of trouble that happens in a town centre with pubs, which fits a place whose centre is a conservation area of narrow frontages and old coaching streets with 23 pubs on the business-rates list.
Surrey Police charges a suspect in about 11% of cases across the whole force, against about 12% nationally, which puts it 30th of 42 forces in England and Wales. In about 36% of cases the force closes the file with nobody identified. Those are force-wide outcomes for the same twelve months, and they say what tends to happen after a report anywhere in Surrey, with no bearing on how likely a report is in Chertsey itself.
On safety, Chertsey is below par for its borough: most of it is ordinary, but the crime rate runs ahead of its neighbours, and a buyer should check the specific street.