Kempston is a reasonably safe town, with a crime rate a little above the rest of Bedford Borough. The gap is small. Most of the mix looks like anywhere else. The shops come off worst. The weaker part of the picture is what happens after someone reports a crime.
Bedfordshire Police recorded 2,660 crimes in Kempston between June 2025 and May 2026, a published rate of about 106 per 1,000 residents. That is roughly 9% above the average for Bedford Borough. On those numbers, Kempston is busier than the borough average but nowhere near the top of the table.
Bedford Borough as a whole ran at about 97 crimes per 1,000 residents over the same year. Put the two side by side and the gap comes to about nine crimes per thousand people. The borough average includes villages where a parked car counts as an event.
Kempston is a busy place, with about 5,300 people per square kilometre on average. Unemployment is about 3%, and about 4% of households are overcrowded. Those figures describe a working town packed fairly tightly, and none of them explains a crime figure on its own.
The mix of crime is where Kempston shows its character. Violence and sexual offences make up about 35% of recorded crime here, the same share as across England and Wales. That category covers everything from common assault without injury upwards, and it is the biggest category almost everywhere. Shoplifting is the one that stands out, at about 15% of crime here against 8% nationally. Anti-social behaviour runs below the national share, at about 13% against 16%. Criminal damage and arson (about 8% against 7%) and public order offences (7% against 7%) are close to the national pattern, as is other theft at about 6% against 7%. Kempston Interchange Retail Park gives the town more tills than most places this size, and not everyone passing through them pays. The police's own street-level crime map, scrolled across the few streets around a house you are viewing, will tell you more than any town-wide average.
Bedfordshire Police charges a suspect in about 10% of cases across the whole force, against about 12% nationally, which puts it 36th of 42 forces. About 38% of cases are closed with nobody identified. These are force-wide figures, so they say nothing about how safe Kempston is. They do say what to expect from Bedfordshire Police if something happens to you: the chances of anyone being charged are below the national average.
Kempston's safety is middling. Crime is ordinary enough to live with comfortably, with a shoplifting habit the retail park brings with it and a police force that charges fewer suspects than the national average.