Above the district average, in the way a city always is when its district is mostly villages. About 151 recorded incidents per thousand residents over the past twelve months. Roughly eighty-seven per cent above the wider local-authority figure. Around 5,750 incidents in total over the year to March 2026. The rate lives next to the cathedral, the night-time strip and the retail core, not next to the rural villages that share the same denominator.
The crime rate works out at about 151 recorded incidents per thousand residents, against a wider local-authority figure of around 81 per thousand. The gap is the structural fact: Chichester is the only city in its district, and one cathedral city of about 33,000 residents shares an authority with around 124,000 people, the rest of whom live in villages that do not produce city-scale numbers. The cathedral postcode is therefore the place where most of the district's crime gets recorded, even when much of what gets recorded involves visitors rather than residents. Around 5,750 incidents were logged across the postcode area in the twelve months to March 2026. Chichester pulls visitors in from across West Sussex for cathedral tourism, the West Coastway line, the Festival Theatre programme, the Saturday-night strip, and a county-town hospital and court catchment. Each of those flows is normal, civic, and economically useful. Each of them adds to the crime numerator without adding to the resident denominator. A visitor who misbehaves on a Saturday night counts in the city's recorded incident count, never in the residents it is divided by. That is the standard published distortion everywhere a small city sits inside a larger rural authority, and it is why the headline rate reads worse than the experience of most residential streets. The Hawkhurst Gang, an eighteenth-century smuggling outfit, were hanged on land that later became the city's military barracks. Chichester has been the place other people's bad behaviour ends up since well before the current police map was drawn.
So: poor on the headline, structurally city-driven, and most of the rate concentrated in the geography you would expect rather than spread evenly across the residential map. The score is poor because the published rate has to make it so, and the residential streets that absorb the average without producing it deserve the same honesty as the strip that does the producing. Read the headline, then read the police map for the specific postcode. Do not buy on the headline alone, and do not pretend the headline is not there.