Yes, and the margin is not a close-run thing. Recorded crime here runs around 30% below the Cornwall average. The whole year's tally would fit comfortably on one page. This is a small town at the head of an estuary, not a night-time economy with a taxi rank attached. The safety on offer is the ordinary kind, built out of low volume rather than heavy policing, and it holds up when you look at the actual figures.
Police.uk recorded 354 crimes across the area's neighbourhoods in the twelve months to May 2026, which works out as a published rate of 52 per 1,000 residents, roughly 30% below the local authority average. Both of those are published figures calculated on their own statistical-area populations. Dividing the count by the town's headcount gives a different number and a wrong one, which has not stopped people doing it on forums for years.
The comparison is worth seeing in full rather than as a percentage. Cornwall as a whole ran at 74 per 1,000 over the same period. Fifty-two against seventy-four is the safety argument here, and it needs no help from adjectives.
The surrounding texture is what you would expect of a place that produces those numbers without trying. Population density averages around 1,190 people per square kilometre across the area, unemployment sits at about 2%, and about 2% of households are overcrowded. None of that explains the crime rate, and nobody should present it as though it does. It simply describes what the town is: spread out, mostly working, and not stacked on top of itself.
The mix of what does get reported needs handling with care. Over the same twelve months, violence and sexual offences accounted for 57% of recorded crime against 35% across England and Wales, though that is a broad statutory grouping covering everything up to and including common assault where nobody is injured, so the share sounds far worse than it reads. Criminal damage and arson made up 12% locally against 7% nationally. Anti-social behaviour came in at 9% here against 16% nationally, which is the opposite of what most people assume about small towns. Public order at 7% and other theft at 6% sit effectively level with the national shares of 7%, and burglary at 3% is a touch under the national 4%. All of that rests on 354 crimes spread across 12 categories, a base small enough that a handful of incidents shifts any share by several points, so treat the mix as this year's snapshot rather than a fixed characteristic of the place.
What happens after someone reports something is a different question, and the answer is less comfortable. Devon & Cornwall Police charged a suspect in about 8% of cases over the same twelve months, against about 12% nationally, placing the force 42nd out of the 42 forces in England and Wales on that measure. In about 26% of cases the file closed with no suspect ever identified. Those are force-wide decisions with no street-level signal in them, and they say nothing about whether Lostwithiel is a safe place to walk home in. They answer the separate question of whether anybody gets caught, and the answer is: less often than most of the country.
Of everything this town can put in front of a buyer, the crime rate is the least arguable. It is comfortably the strongest dimension here, and the only asterisk belongs to what happens afterwards rather than to the streets themselves.