Safe, and dull about it, which is the only kind of safe worth having. Around 47 recorded crimes per thousand people. Just over 800 offences across a year in a town of this size. The district average sits fractionally higher. Nowhere here has a reputation, and reputations are usually what people are actually asking about.
The recorded rate for the year to May 2026 comes out at about 47 crimes per thousand people, from 806 recorded offences over those twelve months. Both are published figures from police.uk rather than anything worked out here, and the rate uses its own statistical population base rather than the resident headcount. That distinction matters more than it sounds, because the two numbers are not designed to be divided into each other.
Set against the South Hams as a whole, which records about 49 per thousand, the town lands roughly 3% below its own district. That is a gap small enough to be noise. Anyone shopping between this town and the villages around it on safety alone is optimising a rounding error.
The texture behind those numbers is what you would guess from the streets. Population density averages around 4,288 people per square kilometre across the town's neighbourhoods, which is suburban rather than rural despite the moor at the top. Unemployment sits at about 2% and overcrowded households at about 1%. None of that causes anything, but it does describe a place where most people are in work, in a house with enough bedrooms, and out of it by eight in the morning.
The category mix is where dashboards frighten people unnecessarily. Violence and sexual offences account for about 46% of recorded crime here against about 35% nationally, and that heading is a broad statutory grouping that sweeps in common assault without injury alongside far graver things. It is the largest single category almost everywhere in England and Wales. Anti-social behaviour runs at about 16% locally against about 16% nationally, criminal damage and arson about 8% against 7%, public order about 7% against 7%, and other theft about 7% against 7%. Shoplifting is about 6% here against roughly 8% nationally. Four of those categories are effectively identical to the national split, which is the least dramatic sentence on this page and the most useful one.
What happens after a report is a separate question, and a less comfortable one. Devon and Cornwall Police charged a suspect in about 8% of cases over the year to May 2026, against about 12% nationally, which places the force last of the 42 in England and Wales. About 26% of cases closed with nobody identified at all. Those are force-wide decisions taken across two counties, not a verdict on this town, and they say nothing about how likely a crime is here. They say a good deal about what follows one.
Safety here is ordinary in the most literal sense: a town sitting almost exactly on its district average, with a category mix that mostly mirrors the country. The number that should give a buyer pause is not the crime rate, it is what the force does with the report afterwards.