Eastbourne is safer than its seafront makes it look. The published crime rate runs at around 128 incidents per 1,000 residents over the past 12 months. That sits roughly 7% below the local-authority average. The total recorded volume comes to about 14,700 incidents in the year to March. The town is the quieter end of the south coast, and the figures back that reading up rather than contradict it.
The published rate is the standard measure used to compare places across England and Wales, and the methodology divides recorded incidents by a population denominator the policing data treats as canonical for the statistical area. It is not the kind of figure to be re-derived by dividing the headline count by the resident population, because the two use different statistical bases and the result will mislead. Taking the published rate as it stands, Eastbourne sits comfortably below the wider local-authority average and at the safer end of comparable coastal resorts. The pattern is what you would expect of a town with a busy seafront, a railway terminus, and a quiet residential hinterland: a concentration of incidents in the central wards where the bars, the pier, and the railway station all sit within a few minutes of each other, and a steady drop-off as you move into the older residential streets towards Meads, the post-war estates around Hampden Park, and the quieter villages above the Downs. None of that is the same as being incident-free. It does mean that anyone choosing where to buy or rent can pick the postcode and pick the level of background noise that comes with it. A property on a residential street a few streets inland is in the safer portion of the safer portion. A property above a busy seafront premises is making the trade most renters and buyers there have already accepted: the noise comes with the address, the seafront comes with the address, and the immediate few hundred metres around any nightlife strip will read worse on the crime map than the town as a whole. The honest reading is that "Eastbourne crime" is not a single number. It is a central pocket and a wider quiet area, and the headline rate is the average of those two things.
Eastbourne scores four out of five on safety, which is the right reading for a town that runs below its local-authority average and well within the comfortable range for comparable coastal resorts. The published rate is what it is. The geography does the rest.