Downderry is about as safe as an English address gets. Sixty-eight recorded crimes in a year, across the entire village. That is a rate roughly 58% below the county's. Thinly populated, almost nobody out of work, next to no overcrowding. The interesting question here is not whether something will happen to you. It is whether anything will happen at all.
The published police neighbourhood figures put recorded crime at about 31 offences per thousand people in the year to May 2026, built from those 68 recorded offences. Both numbers are published as they stand. The rate is calculated on the population of the statistical area the police report against rather than on the village headcount, so anyone tempted to divide one figure by the other and check the working will get a different answer and the wrong one. What the brief does not carry is any breakdown of what those offences were, so nobody should be told what "most of it" consists of, least of all by a website.
Set beside the wider authority, the gap is not subtle. Cornwall as a whole records about 74 offences per thousand people over the same period. Downderry records about 31. Two numbers, same measure, same year.
The surrounding texture is what tends to sit alongside figures like these. Population density here averages about 554 people per square kilometre, unemployment runs at about 3%, and overcrowded households account for about 1%. Those are descriptions of the place, not explanations of the crime rate, and the data makes no claim that one produces the other.
What happens after a report is a separate question, and it is answered force-wide rather than street by street. Devon and Cornwall Police charged a suspect in about 8% of cases in the year to May 2026, against about 12% nationally, which places the force 42nd out of 42 forces in England and Wales. About 26% of cases were closed with nobody identified. None of that is a measure of how safe Downderry is, and it should never be blended with the crime rate: it answers the entirely different question of what the system does once something has already gone wrong. The honest reading is that very little happens here, and if it does, the odds of anyone being charged for it are not encouraging.
Safety is the single strongest thing this village has going for it, and it is not close: crime sits far below the county's level on the same published measure. Just do not confuse a quiet place with an attentive one.