Hertford is safe enough to live in, but it records more crime than the district around it. Police log roughly 87 crimes for every 1,000 residents. That is about a quarter higher than East Hertfordshire as a whole. The extra comes mostly from nuisance and petty theft, with serious harm no more common than elsewhere. Pretty town, average safety for a county town, and buyers should know that before they arrive.
Police.uk records about 87 crimes per 1,000 residents in Hertford for the twelve months from June 2025 to May 2026, 2,694 crimes in total. That published rate is roughly 23% above the East Hertfordshire average. The town has the county's courts and County Hall, and on the crime figures it also carries more of the district's trouble than its share.
Side by side the gap is plain to see. East Hertfordshire as a whole records about 70 crimes per 1,000 residents over the same year, against Hertford's 87. The district is mostly villages and smaller towns, and Hertford is where the people and the busy streets are. When the rest of the district wants a night out, it mostly comes into town.
The town itself is dense and comfortably off. About 5,200 people live in each square kilometre on average, unemployment was about 2% at the 2021 census, and about 3% of households were overcrowded. That describes a compact, working, mostly well-housed town. None of those three figures explains the crime rate, and they shouldn't be read as if they do.
The mix of crime matters more than the total. Violence and sexual offences make up about 35% of Hertford's recorded crime, the same as the 35% across England and Wales, and that category covers everything from serious attacks to common assault with no injury. The real differences are elsewhere. Anti-social behaviour is about 21% of the local total against 16% nationally, and shoplifting about 10% against 8%. Other theft (7% against 7%), criminal damage and arson (6% against 7%) and vehicle crime (6% against 5%) all track the national pattern closely. In 1216 Prince Louis of France besieged and took Hertford Castle. Today's trouble is a smaller kind of nuisance, though there is more of it than in the villages nearby.
Police.uk's street-level map shows reported crime by month around any postcode. For a house near the town centre, looking at the twelve months around that exact street is a better guide than any town-wide average.
What happens after a crime is reported is a different question from how much crime there is. Hertfordshire Constabulary charges a suspect in about 11% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which puts it 23rd of England and Wales's 42 forces. About 40% of its cases are closed with no suspect identified. Those are force-wide figures that cover every town from the edge of London to the Cambridgeshire border, so they say nothing in particular about Hertford.
On safety Hertford is below average. Serious crime isn't the issue, but there is more nuisance and petty crime than in the rest of the district, and anyone buying near the centre will notice it.