Yes, and the scariest thing about the crime numbers here is the wording on the categories. Recorded crime sits slightly below the district average. The district is rural, thinly populated and not somewhere with a crime problem. Nothing alarming is hiding behind a comfortable headline. A safe small town, in other words, that a badly labelled dashboard can make sound like somewhere else entirely.
Police.uk recorded 386 crimes in the town in the year to May 2026, giving a published rate of about 53 per thousand residents. That figure sits roughly 5% below the average for the wider Torridge area. Both numbers are published rates calculated on statistical-area populations rather than something worked out from the crime count and the resident headcount, which is why the two should be read side by side rather than rebuilt from scratch.
Set against each other, the town comes in at about 53 per thousand and Torridge as a whole at about 55. That is a small gap. It means Great Torrington is an ordinary example of the district it sits in, neither the quiet outlier nor the place that drags the average up. Anyone hoping for a market town that is dramatically safer than its neighbours is looking at the wrong lever.
The texture behind those numbers is what you would find in most of rural Devon. Unemployment runs at about 2%, and about 2% of households are overcrowded. Population density averages around 3,000 people per square kilometre across the town's neighbourhoods, which reflects a compact hilltop settlement rather than scattered farmland. These describe the kind of place it is rather than explaining the crime figures, and nobody should read them as cause and effect.
The mix needs handling with care, because the totals are small enough that a handful of incidents shifts a share by several points. On that basis, and over the same twelve months, violence and sexual offences account for about 49% of recorded crime against roughly 35% nationally. That category is a broad statutory grouping covering everything from serious offences to common assault without injury, and it is the largest category almost everywhere in England and Wales. Criminal damage and arson runs at about 11% locally against roughly 7% nationally. Shoplifting sits at about 10% against roughly 8%, which is close to the national position. Anti-social behaviour comes in at about 10% locally against roughly 16% nationally, so it makes up a smaller slice here than across the country. Public order and other theft both land slightly below the national shares. With 386 crimes spread across eleven categories, none of this should be treated as a settled characteristic of the town.
What happens after a report is a separate question from how safe the streets are, and the two get blended together constantly. Devon and Cornwall Police charged a suspect in about 8% of cases over the year to May 2026, against roughly 12% nationally, which places the force last of the 42 forces in England and Wales on that measure. About 26% of cases were closed with no suspect identified. That is a force-wide statistic with nothing street-level in it, but it is the honest answer to the question people actually mean when they ask whether anyone gets caught.
Safety here comes out middling in the most literal sense: a shade better than the district it belongs to, a long way from anywhere that needs thinking about twice, and let down only by what happens after the report rather than before it.