Yes, and comfortably so. Recorded crime here runs about four in ten below the wider district. Two in a hundred working-age residents are unemployed. Overcrowded households barely register. Nobody moves to a hilltop market town in mid Devon expecting a crime wave, and nothing in the record obliges them to reconsider.
Police.uk recorded 377 crimes across this area in the year to May 2026, giving a published rate of 37 per thousand residents. That figure sits roughly 39% below the Mid Devon average. Both numbers are published as they stand rather than worked out from a population count, which matters because the rate uses a statistical population base of its own and any homemade division produces a different and wrong answer.
The comparison is worth seeing whole rather than as a percentage. Mid Devon as a whole records about 60 crimes per thousand residents. This area records about 37. The gap between those two numbers is the entire argument, and it holds across a full twelve months rather than a flattering quarter.
The texture behind the numbers is the obvious one. Population density averages 326 people per square kilometre, which in practice means fields with a town in the middle of them. Unemployment sits at 2% and overcrowded households at 1%. None of that causes anything on its own, and the honest reading is simply that this is a settled, low-density, largely owner-occupied area, and settled low-density areas tend to produce records that look like this one.
On what gets recorded, the mix needs its caveat before its numbers. The totals here are low enough that a handful of incidents moves a category by several percentage points, so the mix describes one year rather than a permanent characteristic of the place. With that said, violence and sexual offences account for 52% of recorded crime against 35% nationally, a broad statutory grouping that covers everything from serious assault to common assault without injury, and one that is the largest category almost everywhere in England and Wales. Criminal damage and arson run at 11% against 7% nationally. Other theft is 7% against 7%, and public order 7% against 7%, both effectively at the national pattern. Burglary is 5% against 4%. The one category running notably below the national picture is anti-social behaviour, at 7% here against 16% nationally, which is what a town without a late-night strip tends to look like on a dashboard.
What happens after a report is a separate question, and a less flattering one. Devon and Cornwall Police charged a suspect in about 8% of cases over the same twelve months, against about 12% nationally, which places the force 42nd of the 42 forces in England and Wales. About 26% of cases closed with no suspect identified at all. Those are force-wide figures covering a vast rural area from Bristol Channel to Land's End, they carry no street-level signal, and they answer a completely different question from the crime rate: how likely something is to happen to you, and what follows if it does, are not the same enquiry. A low-crime area policed by a force with a low charge rate is exactly what the numbers describe.
Safety is the single strongest thing this area has, and it is strong in the boring, structural way that lasts: not a good year on a bad street, but a low number across a whole district of villages. The realistic worry here is what happens after an incident, not whether one is likely in the first place.