Yes, and not in the way seaside towns usually mean it. Recorded crime here runs below the rate for Cornwall as a whole. Unemployment is low, hardly anyone lives in an overcrowded home, and the density figure describes a town rather than a city. The thing worth worrying about in Looe is not what gets reported. It is what happens after you report it.
Police.uk recorded 467 crimes across the area in the twelve months to May 2026, which works out at a published rate of 68 per thousand people. That sits roughly 8% below the Cornwall average. Both of those are published figures on their own statistical-area population base, so they are not something to check with a calculator against the resident headcount, and anyone who does will get a different number and the wrong conclusion.
The comparison is more useful with both numbers on the table. Cornwall as a whole records 74 crimes per thousand people over the same twelve months, against Looe's 68. That is a modest gap rather than a chasm. Looe is a slightly quieter than average corner of a county that is already fairly quiet, which is a less thrilling sentence than most estate agents would like but a more accurate one.
The texture behind those numbers is straightforward enough. Population density averages around 2,536 people per square kilometre across the area, which is town-shaped rather than rural and reflects a place packed tightly around a river mouth. Unemployment sits at 2%, and 1% of households are classed as overcrowded. None of those figures causes anything on their own. They describe the kind of settled, low-churn, largely settled-down place that tends not to generate much of a police workload.
The mix of what does get recorded needs handling with care, because the totals here are small enough that a handful of incidents moves a share by several points, and a share that moves that easily is not a characteristic of the place. With that firmly in mind: violence and sexual offences account for 49% of recorded crime against 35% nationally, which sounds worse than it is, because that category is a wide statutory grouping that includes common assault without injury and is the largest category almost everywhere in England and Wales. Criminal damage and arson runs at 14% against 7% nationally. Public order at 8% and other theft at 8% both sit close to the national shares of 7% each. Anti-social behaviour at 11% and shoplifting at 4% are both lower than the national 16% and 8%. Read that as a rough sketch, not a diagnosis.
The genuinely uncomfortable number is what follows a report. Devon and Cornwall Police charged a suspect in about 8% of cases over the twelve months to May 2026, against about 12% nationally, and the force ranks 42nd out of 42 forces on that measure. In 26% of cases the file closes with no suspect identified at all. This is a force-wide figure, decided force-wide, and it says nothing about any particular street in Looe. It also answers a completely different question from the crime rate: how likely something is to happen to you, and how likely anyone is to be charged for it, are separate matters, and blending them produces nonsense.
Safety is one of the stronger things Looe has going for it. The town is quieter than the county around it, and the real frustration for residents is not the number of things that happen but the odds of anyone answering for them afterwards.