Havant is on the wrong side of average for crime. The recorded rate is about 114 incidents per thousand residents over the year to March 2026, against a wider local-authority average of about 85. That is roughly a third higher. Around 5,800 incidents were logged across the year. The borough's quieter postcodes do the work of dragging the average down, which means Havant proper carries the headline on its own.
The recorded crime rate sits at about 114 incidents per thousand residents over the twelve months to March 2026. The wider Havant Borough rate, covering a local-authority population of about 124,000 that pools the town with Hayling Island, Emsworth, Waterlooville and the smaller villages, comes in closer to 85 per thousand. The gap between the town and the borough is roughly a third, and the gap is not arithmetic noise. It is what happens when a borough contains an urban centre and a string of quieter coastal and village postcodes that pull the average down without lowering the urban centre's exposure.
That gap is the headline part of the answer. The borough average is held down by the postcodes around the town rather than by anything happening inside it. Hayling Island, Emsworth, Cowplain and Waterlooville all sit below the borough number. Havant town sits above it. The two should not be confused for each other. The buyer reading the borough figure and assuming it spreads evenly is buying the wrong product; the benefit of the average accrues to the harbour postcodes, and the cost falls on the urban centre.
Across the same twelve-month window, from April 2025 through to March 2026, roughly 5,800 incidents were recorded inside the town's footprint. The category breakdown sits on the public police street-level map rather than in any single town-level summary, and any buyer looking at a specific address is better served by that map than by the borough headline. Havant is not a high-crime place by national standards. It is not a low-crime place either. It sits above the borough it belongs to, and the borough chooses to publish the average rather than the spread, which is the version of the data estate agents prefer to quote.
The verdict is below average for safety, in a borough that otherwise sits around the south-coast middle. The buyer who picks Havant on a borough-wide crime claim has been sold the borough, not the town.