Yes, on the numbers. Crime runs at about 85 offences per thousand residents a year, which sits roughly 5% below the local-authority average for the wider Arun area. Around 5,600 recorded offences over the twelve months to March 2026. Not a low-crime town in absolute terms, not a high-crime one either. A working seaside town that lands on the safer side of the local average, which is where a town of this size and function tends to sit.
On the detail, the rate of about 85 per thousand is the published crime figure for the year to March 2026, pooling Littlehampton, its neighbouring villages, and the wider postcode footprint into one number. The Arun-wide rate sits at roughly 89 per thousand, which puts the town about 5% below the local-authority average. Close enough to the average to count as effectively at it, rather than clearly ahead of it. The two rates come from different statistical footprints, and are not something the reader should try to reproduce by dividing the offence count by the resident population, since the published rate uses its own denominator. What matters is the comparison to the local area, and on that comparison Littlehampton is a shade lighter than the district it sits inside.
Volume across the twelve-month window came to around 5,600 offences. That is what recorded crime looks like in a town of this size that includes a working town centre, a station on the main network, and a seafront frontage. It covers every category the police record: acquisitive, violent, disorder, and everything else that reaches a report. A headline figure of 5,600 offences over twelve months feels weighty when read as a single number. Standardised as a rate per thousand residents and compared to the surrounding area, it collapses back into the middling profile the rate figure describes.
None of that tells you which specific streets carry the weight of the count, or which times of the week and year the picture concentrates around. The published data supports that level of analysis, but doing it well requires a look at the local map rather than a paragraph on a page. Anyone weighing safety on a specific address should pull the recorded crime for the individual postcode over the last twelve months, rather than take the town-wide rate as the answer to the doorstep-level question. The rate answers the town question. It does not answer the street question.
Littlehampton is, on the numbers, a safe area by working-seaside-town standards. Below the local-authority average by a small margin, and well clear of the sort of rate that makes the map light up on the wrong side of the comparison. Which is roughly what most buyers actually want the safety answer to be.