Safe, and boringly so. About 150 recorded crimes in a year is the entire ledger. The rate runs meaningfully below the county's. The nearest thing to a pattern is that the biggest category is the biggest category everywhere. Whatever keeps people awake in a valley this size, it is not the crime figures.
Police.uk records a rate of about 78 crimes per thousand people for the year to May 2026, built on 150 recorded offences over those twelve months. That sits roughly 16% below the Somerset average. Both of those are published figures rather than anything worked out here, and it is worth knowing that the rate uses a statistical-area population rather than the headcount of people you would meet in the street, so dividing one by the other at home will not reproduce it.
The comparison is more useful with both numbers visible. Somerset as a whole records about 93 crimes per thousand people over the same twelve months, against roughly 78 here. That is a real gap rather than a rounding artefact, though anyone expecting the difference between a market town and a city should adjust their expectations: this is one rural corner of a rural county being slightly quieter than the rest of it.
The texture behind those numbers is what you would guess from the map. The neighbourhood averages about 1,260 people per square kilometre, which sounds dense until you remember the boundary is drawn tight around a town centre with moorland doing everything else. Unemployment sits at about 2% and overcrowding at about 1%, both from the 2021 census. None of that causes anything on its own. It just describes the kind of place where 150 incidents constitutes a busy year.
The mix comes with a large asterisk. With 150 crimes spread across nine categories, a handful of incidents shifts a share by several points, so this is a snapshot rather than a characteristic. Violence and sexual offences account for about 47% of the total against roughly 35% nationally, a category that spans a wide statutory range including common assault without injury and is the largest one almost everywhere in England and Wales. Public order sits at about 13% against roughly 7% nationally. Anti-social behaviour at about 17% against roughly 16%, criminal damage and arson at 8% against roughly 7%, and other theft at 6% against roughly 7% are all close enough to the national shares to be unremarkable. Shoplifting runs at about 6% against roughly 8%, which is easier to achieve when there are fewer shops to work with.
What happens after a report is a separate question from how much crime there is, and the two should not be blended. Avon and Somerset Constabulary charges a suspect in about 11% of cases against roughly 12% nationally, and closes about 30% with nobody identified at all, both over the year to May 2026. The force ranks 24th of 42. These are force-wide decisions made across a territory stretching well beyond Exmoor, so they say nothing about this particular valley, and they answer the question of whether anyone gets caught rather than the question of whether anything happens to you.
Safety is one of the better arguments for living here. The numbers are quietly good, the volume is low enough that the categories mean less than they look like they mean, and the thing most likely to inconvenience you in Dulverton will arrive by weather rather than by anyone's intent.