Combe Martin is safe by any reading of the numbers. The recorded crime rate runs at roughly half the district's. The whole village logs fewer offences in a year than most people assume happen in a month. Unemployment barely registers and almost nobody lives in an overcrowded home. This is a place where the loudest thing on a February night is the weather.
Police.uk recorded 145 offences across the village in the year to May 2026, a rate of about 37 per thousand people. That published rate sits roughly 50% below the North Devon average. Both figures are published as they stand, and the rate is calculated against a statistical population base rather than the resident headcount, so it is not a sum worth reconstructing at the kitchen table.
The comparison is worth seeing whole. North Devon as a whole records about 73 offences per thousand people over that same year. Combe Martin records about 37. That is not a marginal difference dressed up as a headline. It is the district figure roughly halved.
The texture behind it is what you would expect of a village built along one valley. Population density averages about 1,500 people per square kilometre across the neighbourhood areas here, which reads as suburban only because those areas are drawn around the built strip rather than the farmland behind it. Unemployment sits at about 2%, and roughly 2% of households are overcrowded. None of that causes anything on its own, but it describes a settled, low-churn, mostly owner-occupied place, and settled places generate fewer reports.
The mix needs handling with care, because 145 offences spread across 11 categories means a handful of incidents can shift a share by several points, and nothing here should be read as a fixed characteristic of the village. With that said, violence and sexual offences made up about 46% of the total against roughly 35% nationally, a broad statutory grouping that runs from common assault without injury upwards and is the largest category almost everywhere. Public order accounted for around 12% against about 7% nationally, other theft about 9% against roughly 7%, and criminal damage and arson about 8% against roughly 7%, which is close enough to the national picture to be unremarkable. Burglary came in around 6% against about 4%. The category running well below the national share is anti-social behaviour, at roughly 7% here against about 16% nationally. Whether that reflects behaviour or reporting is a question the numbers do not answer.
What happens after a report is a different question from how much crime there is, and the two should not be blended. Devon and Cornwall Police charges a suspect in about 8% of cases, against roughly 12% across England and Wales, over the same twelve months to May 2026. That places the force 42nd of 42. Bottom of forty-two is not a rounding artefact. Around 26% of cases close with nobody identified at all, which is the honest answer to whether anyone will be caught if your shed goes overnight. That is a force-wide figure covering everything from Bristol Channel villages to Plymouth, and it carries no signal about this postcode specifically.
Safety is the thing Combe Martin does best. A crime rate at half the district's, in a village where most people own their homes and have done for years, is about as reassuring as this data gets.