Little Dunmow is a safe place to live, with less crime than the rest of a district that already has fairly little of it. The rate runs well under the district average. Unemployment barely registers. Almost nobody lives in an overcrowded home. Its worst recorded troublemakers were medieval barons.
In the year to June 2025 through May 2026, Essex Police recorded 183 crimes in Little Dunmow, and the published rate works out at about 44 per 1,000 residents. That is roughly 28% below the average for Uttlesford. The rate is calculated on the population of the official statistical areas the police data uses, which don't match the village's own boundary exactly, so the count and the rate should be read side by side and not divided one into the other.
Across Uttlesford as a whole the rate is about 62 per 1,000, against about 44 here. Uttlesford is a rural district of market towns and villages, so this is a below-average figure in a district where crime is already fairly low.
The area behind those numbers is a modern estate, packed fairly tightly by village standards, at an average of about 5,600 people per square kilometre across its small statistical areas. Unemployment was about 2% at the 2021 census and about 1% of households were overcrowded. Those figures describe the neighbourhood, and none of them on its own explains a crime rate. What they describe is a place where most adults go out to work and most homes have room for everyone in them.
By category, violence and sexual offences made up about 39% of recorded crime here against about 35% nationally. That category covers a wide legal range, including common assault where nobody was hurt, and it is the largest almost everywhere. Anti-social behaviour was about 13% against about 16% nationally, and vehicle crime about 12% against about 5%. Other theft accounted for about 10% against 7%, criminal damage and arson about 9% against 7%, and public order offences about 8% against 7%. With 183 crimes in a year, a few incidents in either direction can move any of those shares by several points, so the mix describes one year's reports and is too small to call a pattern. The vehicle crime share is the line worth watching, on a commuter estate with a car on most driveways, and the next year's figures will show whether it holds up.
What happens after a report is a separate question, answered at force level. Across Essex, Essex Police charges a suspect in about 11% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which puts it 28th of 42 forces. About 37% of its cases close with no suspect identified. Those figures describe the force across the whole county and say nothing about whether the village is safe. They do show that a stolen catalytic converter is more likely to be logged than solved.
Safety is one of Little Dunmow's real strengths. The last people to cause real trouble here were the Baynards and the FitzWalters, who rebelled against two kings and lost their lands for it, and nothing since has come close.