Yes, and the whole year's crime total would fit on a single page. Recorded crime runs a shade under the wider district's rate. Most categories hold only a handful of incidents each. Getting anyone charged afterwards is a different matter, and that part has nothing to do with Holsworthy. Safe is the right word here. Policed is a separate question.
Police.uk recorded 253 crimes across the neighbourhoods covering the town in the twelve months to May 2026, and publishes a rate of about 52 crimes per 1,000 people over the same period. That sits roughly 6% below the average for Torridge, the local authority the town belongs to. Both numbers are published as they stand. The rate is calculated on a statistical-area population rather than the resident headcount, so anyone dividing the 253 by the number of people they think live here will get a different answer and the wrong one.
Set side by side, Torridge runs at about 55 crimes per 1,000 people over that year and Holsworthy at about 52. That is a gap you would never feel walking home, which is the honest version of the comparison. The useful part is not that the town beats its district by a few points. It is that the district itself is not somewhere that generates a large number to beat.
The texture behind those figures is what you would expect of a small market town surrounded by farmland. Population density across the built-up neighbourhoods averages about 2,560 people per square kilometre, unemployment sits at about 3%, and roughly 2% of households are counted as overcrowded. None of those figures causes or prevents crime, and treating them as an explanation would be inventing a mechanism nobody measured. They describe the kind of place the numbers came from.
On the mix, one caveat comes first because without it the largest category reads as alarming. Violence and sexual offences make up about 51% of the recorded total here against about 35% across England and Wales. That grouping is broad and statutory, covering everything from serious assault down to common assault without injury, and it is the biggest single category almost everywhere in the country. Other theft runs at about 10% locally against 7% nationally, and shoplifting at about 9% against 8%. Criminal damage and arson at about 6%, and public order at about 6%, both sit within a point or so of the national shares. Anti-social behaviour is the one that runs clearly lower, about 9% here against 16% nationally. All of this rests on 253 incidents spread across 12 categories, which is a small enough base that a few incidents in a single month move a share by several points, so read the mix as this year's arithmetic rather than a settled trait of the place.
What happens after a report is the genuinely uncomfortable figure, and it belongs to the force rather than the town. Devon and Cornwall Police charged a suspect in about 8% of cases over the twelve months to May 2026, against about 12% nationally, which places it 42nd of the 42 forces ranked. About 26% of cases closed with no suspect identified at all. Charging decisions are made force-wide, so none of that describes one street or one estate, and it answers a different question from the crime rate. The rate tells you how likely something is to happen. This tells you what to expect afterwards, which for most property crime is a reference number and a shrug.
Safety is one of the better things about living here: less crime than the surrounding district, small absolute numbers, and nothing in the record that would make anyone think twice about the walk back from the pub. Just do not confuse a quiet town with a force that will find your stolen quad bike.