Drybrook records clearly more crime than the rest of the Forest of Dean. Its rate is nearly half as high again as the district average. Unemployment is low and overcrowding is rare. The police force that covers it charges fewer suspects than most. The scenery looks a good deal calmer than the police log reads.
The police recorded 361 crimes in Drybrook in the year to May 2026, a published rate of about 62 per 1,000 residents. That is roughly 47% above the average for the Forest of Dean. The rate is calculated on a different population base from the village's census headcount, so it should be taken as published and not recalculated from the count. Put the exact postcode into the police's own street-level crime map, because a village rate spreads one stretch of road across every house in the village.
Across the whole Forest of Dean, the comparable rate is about 43 crimes per 1,000 residents. Drybrook's 62 is a long way above that. Neighbouring villages in the same district manage with less.
The neighbourhood itself looks steady on paper. There are about 1,170 people per square kilometre, unemployment is about 2%, and about 2% of households are overcrowded. None of that explains the crime figure, and nothing in it points to a cause. It describes a settled working village whose police numbers belong to somewhere busier.
By category, violence and sexual offences make up about 38% of Drybrook's recorded crime, close to the 35% national share. That category covers a wide legal range, including common assault where nobody is hurt. The real gap is anti-social behaviour, at about 28% here against about 16% nationally. Public order offences are about 8% (7% nationally), shoplifting about 6% (8%), other theft about 6% (7%) and criminal damage and arson about 5% (7%). With only a few hundred crimes in total, a handful of reports can move any of those shares by several points. The mix describes this one year and may not hold in the next. Anti-social behaviour is the category that stands out, and the problem looks closer to persistent nuisance than to danger.
Charging is decided across the whole county, so the next figures belong to the force, not the village. Gloucestershire Constabulary charges a suspect in about 9% of cases, against about 12% nationally, based on the eight months it reported in the year to May 2026. That puts it 39th of 42 forces. About 33% of its cases close with no suspect identified at all. These figures say nothing about how likely a crime is in Drybrook. They describe the odds that someone is charged after one happens, and those odds are poor.
Safety is Drybrook's weak point. The village carries a crime rate well above the district around it, and the county force has one of the lowest charge rates in the country.