Yes, Danbury is a safe place, and the crime figures make that easy to see. Crime here runs at around half the Chelmsford rate. Unemployment is close to nil. Overcrowding barely shows up. Most of the village is detached houses and lanes, and they generate very little for the police to record.
Essex Police recorded 349 crimes in Danbury in the twelve months to May 2026, a published rate of about 42 per 1,000 residents. That is roughly 50% below the average for the Chelmsford council area over the same year.
Across the whole of Chelmsford, the published rate for that year was about 84 crimes per 1,000 residents, against Danbury's 42. Chelmsford is the city a few miles west, with a city centre, a night-time economy and a railway station. Danbury has bungalows, a country park and two conservation areas, and none of those produce many crime reports.
The village has room to spread out. Population density averages about 1,490 people per square kilometre across the neighbourhood areas that make up Danbury, about 2% of working-age residents are unemployed, and about 1% of households are overcrowded. These numbers describe what the place is like. They do not explain why crime is low.
The mix of crime needs care, because the totals are small enough that a handful of incidents can move any category by several points. Over the same twelve months, violence and sexual offences made up about 44% of recorded crime in Danbury, against about 35% across England and Wales. That category covers a wide legal range, including common assault where nobody was hurt, and it is the largest category almost everywhere. Burglary made up about 9%, against 4% nationally, and criminal damage and arson about 9%, against 7%. Vehicle crime, about 6%, and public order offences, about 6%, are close to the national shares of 5% and 7%. Anti-social behaviour made up only about 6%, against 16% nationally. The burglary share is the one buyers will notice. On totals this small, it is something to keep an eye on and does not describe the village for good. The police's street-level crime map shows what has been reported on the roads around a particular house. Look at it over several months, not just the latest one.
What happens after a report is a separate question from how safe the area is. Essex Police charges a suspect in about 11% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which puts it 28th of 42 forces in England and Wales. The force closes about 37% of cases with no suspect identified. Those are force-wide figures for the whole of Essex and say nothing about whether Danbury itself is safe.
On the crime figures, Danbury is one of the safest places around Chelmsford. It has far fewer reports than the city next door, and the main thing to watch is the burglary share.