Yes, and not by the thin margin places usually mean when they say it. One hundred and twenty nine recorded crimes across a whole year, in a village where employment is close to full and overcrowding barely registers. The rate sits well under the Cornwall average. The catch here is not whether something happens to you, it is what follows the phone call. Quiet in Delabole is a measurable fact rather than a sales line.
The police.uk figures put the recorded crime rate at around 40 crimes per thousand residents over the twelve months to May 2026, from 129 recorded offences in the area. That is the published rate for the area rather than a calculation anyone should attempt at home, since the rate and the raw count are built on different population bases. Taken at face value, it describes a village where recorded crime is unusual enough to be conversation rather than background noise.
The comparison that gives it meaning is Cornwall itself, which records around 74 crimes per thousand residents over the same period. Delabole comes in a long way below that, and the gap is wide rather than marginal. Cornwall is not a high-crime county to begin with, which makes sitting well under its average the stronger version of the claim.
The texture behind those numbers is unremarkable in the ways that tend to matter. Population density averages around 735 people per square kilometre across the area, which is village rather than town. Unemployment runs at about 2%, and about 2% of households are overcrowded. None of that causes anything on its own, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise, but it is the profile of a settled place where most people are housed adequately and in work.
The mix of what gets recorded needs handling carefully, because with 129 offences across ten categories a handful of incidents moves any share by several points. On that basis, violence and sexual offences accounted for about 55% of the total, against about 35% across England and Wales. That category is a broad statutory grouping that includes common assault without injury, so it runs largest almost everywhere and a bare quotation of it makes any village sound like a different place entirely. Other theft came in at about 10% against about 7% nationally, public order at about 9% against about 7%, and criminal damage and arson at about 8% against about 7%, all of them close enough to the national shares to be unremarkable. Anti social behaviour ran at about 9% against about 16% nationally, which is the one genuine difference in the list. None of this should be read as a settled characteristic of the village. It is one year of small numbers.
What happens after a report is a different question with a less comfortable answer, and it belongs to the force rather than the village. Devon and Cornwall Police charge a suspect in about 8% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which places the force 42nd out of 42 forces. Around 26% of cases are closed with nobody identified at all. That is the honest answer to whether they will catch them, and it says nothing about how safe Delabole is, because charging decisions are made across an entire force area and carry no signal about any particular street. Low crime and low charge rates are two separate facts that happen to sit in the same postcode.
Safety is the single strongest thing this village has going for it. Very little happens here, and the numbers back that up rather than merely flattering it, which is a sentence most places cannot honestly write.