Cholsey is a safe area, and safer than the district around it. Crime runs about a fifth below the South Oxfordshire rate. Unemployment is low, and overcrowding hardly registers. The local crime numbers are small enough that a few incidents can move them. It has the ordinary problems of an Oxfordshire village, and not many of them.
Thames Valley Police recorded 490 crimes in the Cholsey area in the year from June 2025 to May 2026, which the published figures put at about 40 per 1,000 residents. That is roughly 19% below the South Oxfordshire average.
South Oxfordshire as a whole ran at about 49 crimes per 1,000 residents over the same twelve months, against about 40 here. The gap is real but moderate. Whatever is pushing the district's figure up, the Cholsey area is not where most of it comes from.
The area averages about 1,180 residents per square kilometre, with about 2% unemployment at the 2021 census and about 1% of households overcrowded. Those figures describe a village with roomy houses and low unemployment. They are not why crime is low, but they are what the area looks like.
The largest category locally is violence and sexual offences, at about 45% of recorded crime against about 35% nationally. That heading is the largest almost everywhere, and it includes common assault where nobody was injured. Anti-social behaviour is about 10% here against about 16% nationally. Criminal damage and arson, public order offences and other theft each run at about 7% to 8%, close to their national shares. Burglary is about 8% against about 4% nationally. With 490 crimes in total, a handful of incidents can move any of these shares by several points, so one year's mix says little about the place. The police.uk street-level map shows where the recorded incidents fell over recent months, and a few minutes on it for the actual road on the shortlist will tell a buyer more than a village-wide percentage.
After a crime is reported, Thames Valley Police charges a suspect in about 9% of cases across the whole force, against about 12% nationally, which puts it 37th of 42 forces. About 37% of its cases close with no suspect identified. Those are force-wide figures, decided across Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, and they measure what happens after a crime, not how often crime happens in Cholsey. A low crime rate keeps a village safe. A low charge rate only matters to people who become victims.
Cholsey is safer than its district by a comfortable margin, and that is one of the better things about it.