Lewes is safer than the district average. About 67 recorded incidents per thousand residents over the last twelve months. Roughly six percent below the local-authority rate of around 72. About 3,064 recorded crimes over the year. A market town doing market-town numbers, no more and no less.
The published crime rate runs to about 67 incidents per thousand residents over the most recent twelve-month window, which sits roughly six percent below the local-authority rate of around 72. That puts Lewes broadly at the local-authority average rather than dramatically beneath it, and the report classifies the comparison as "at" rather than "below". The total volume across the same period was around 3,064 recorded crimes. Three thousand crimes in a year sounds like a lot until you remember that modern police recording categories include the kinds of incidents that thirty years ago would have been a doorstep conversation, a row outside a pub, or nothing at all. The published rate is the figure that compares like with like across England, and that figure puts Lewes in the comfortable middle of the table. The volume figure tells you mostly that a county town of around thirty-eight thousand residents, with a population that visits, shops, drinks and parks in it, will generate plenty of small incidents over the course of a year. A bonfire week alone produces a spike that anywhere else would call a quarterly figure. The High Street, the Saturday food market on Cliffe, the railway station and the surrounding parishes all contribute to the count, and none of it is the kind of thing that makes the front page outside Lewes. The honest framing is that the town is statistically safer than the district as a whole, and not dramatically so, which is the same conclusion a long-term resident would give you if you asked one on the High Street.
This report grades the safety question four out of five. Lewes is safe. It is not the kind of town where you leave the door unlocked, but it is the kind of town where the dog gets walked at ten on a Tuesday night without anybody thinking about it.