One of the safer postcodes on the south coast, on the data available. About 51 crimes per thousand residents over the last twelve months. The wider Havant local-authority average across the same window was 85. Emsworth pulls the local-authority number down, not up. Roughly 965 recorded incidents across a town of thirteen thousand.
The rate works out at about 51 incidents per thousand residents across the year from April 2025 to March 2026, the most recent twelve-month window the brief carries. The wider Havant local authority, which includes the town along with Havant proper, Hayling Island and the surrounding villages, runs at about 85 per thousand across the same window. Emsworth sits well below that average. The local authority of about 124,000 people contains pockets that run materially hotter on crime than the headline number suggests, and Emsworth is one of the postcodes pulling the average in the other direction rather than up.
The 965 recorded incidents across twelve months covers everything in the published Home Office categories: violence, theft, criminal damage, public order, drugs, the lot, rolled into one rate. The brief does not break that down by street, by time of day, or by incident type, so anyone wanting to see whether a specific road runs hotter than the headline average should check the police mapping tool directly before committing to an offer. What the brief carries is the aggregate, and the aggregate is calmer than the surrounding areas on the same measure.
Worth being honest about what the rate does and does not tell you. Police-recorded crime captures reported incidents, which means it is sensitive to whether residents report things, whether the area has visible enforcement, and how the population sits across the geography. An older, owner-occupier town with a harbour rather than a nightlife economy will generate fewer of the public-order and weekend-night incidents than a town with twenty pubs on one road. Some of the gap between Emsworth and the Havant average is the geography of the place talking. Some of it is the age and tenure profile talking. Either way, the number is what it is.
Worth saying clearly: that lower headline rate does not mean nothing happens. A town of thirteen thousand recording roughly a thousand incidents a year still has incidents most weeks of the year, and they happen to the people they happen to. Vehicle crime, shed break-ins, the occasional disorder spilling out of a pub, and the usual rural-edge fly-tipping are all present in the published data even if the rate is low against comparators. The geography makes those incidents rarer than they would be in Havant proper, not absent.
Emsworth rates as excellent on safety, which is the rare case where the headline number and the look-and-feel of the place agree. The risk is not zero, because the risk is never zero. It is just lower than the surrounding postcodes and lower than most south-coast towns of the same size, and that is exactly what the data is for telling you.