Grove is about as safe as the rest of the Vale of White Horse, which is a reassuring answer, though not a glowing one. Its crime rate runs a little above the district's. A little over half of recorded crime is violent or public-order offending. Thieves and vandals turn up less often than they do elsewhere. When something is reported, the local force charges someone less often than most.
Thames Valley Police recorded 556 crimes in Grove in the year to May 2026, which works out to a published rate of about 61 per 1,000 residents. That is roughly 5% above the average for the Vale of White Horse. The count covers the whole village, so a single busy patch can move it more than the gap suggests.
For the Vale of White Horse as a whole, the published rate is about 58 crimes per 1,000 residents, against Grove's 61. The gap is three crimes per thousand people. Buyers who rule Grove out on that difference and choose a house a few miles down the road have bought into almost exactly the same crime rate, just under a different village name.
Grove packs in about 4,000 people per square kilometre across its streets, which is close for a place that still calls itself a village. Unemployment is about 2%, and only around 2% of homes are overcrowded. This is a village of houses with gardens and people with jobs, and those two numbers alone give little sign of where the crime comes from.
The mix is where Grove looks different from the national pattern. Violence and sexual offences make up about 49% of recorded crime in Grove, against about 35% across England and Wales. That police category is broad, and it includes common assault where nobody was injured, but the gap is still real. Public order offences make up about 9%, against 7% nationally. The theft and damage figures come in below the national picture. Anti-social behaviour is about 13% of the total against 16%, shoplifting 6% against 8%, other theft 5% against 7%, and criminal damage and arson 5% against 7%. Grove does not have much of a shoplifting or vandalism problem, and the larger share of its recorded crime involves people falling out with each other. Night buses run from Oxford to Wantage on Friday and Saturday nights. For the people on the last one home, Grove is the first stop.
Thames Valley Police charges a suspect in about 9% of cases across its whole area, against about 12% nationally, which puts it 37th of 42 forces. In about 37% of cases the force closes the file with no suspect identified. These are force-wide figures, decided across Thames Valley, and they say nothing about Grove's own streets or how safe they are. They do answer a buyer's second question, though. Thames Valley Police counts crime in Grove as carefully as anyone, and it is noticeably worse at catching whoever did it. Look up the street-level crime map for the road you are buying on, which shows where reported incidents happened.
Grove is middling for safety. It is close enough to the district average that a buyer needs no fear of it and has no reason to brag about it either.