Loughton is reasonably safe, with a crime rate a little above the rest of its district. Shoplifting runs well ahead of the national pattern. Anti-social behaviour runs well behind it. Violence makes up about the same share as it does almost everywhere else.
Police.uk records 83 crimes per 1,000 residents in Loughton for the year from June 2025 to May 2026, about 9% above the Epping Forest district average, from a total of about 2,770 recorded crimes. Both are published figures. A twelve-month window is long enough that one bad weekend cannot reshape it.
Across the Epping Forest district as a whole, the rate for the same year was about 76 per 1,000. Loughton's 83 is above that, but the gap is a few crimes per thousand people, not a different kind of town.
Loughton is a built-up place, averaging about 5,390 residents per square kilometre. Unemployment is about 3% and about 5% of households are overcrowded. Those figures describe a busy suburban town where most adults are in work and most homes have enough room. On their own they explain little about the crime figures.
The crime mix is where Loughton has a character of its own. Violence and sexual offences, a broad legal category that includes common assault without injury, make up about 36% of recorded crime here against about 35% nationally, so the two are close. Shoplifting accounts for about 14% against 8% nationally, and vehicle crime about 8% against 5%. Anti-social behaviour is about 10% here against 16% nationally, while criminal damage and arson (about 7% against 7%) and public order offences (about 6% against 7%) sit close to the national shares. Two shops on the High Road are linked with the cast of The Only Way is Essex, and the shoplifting share suggests that not every visitor to the High Road arrives meaning to pay. The police.uk map lets you check the street-level pattern for any road on your shortlist, which is more use than the town total if the house is a few doors from the shops.
Charging is decided across a whole force. Essex Police charges a suspect in about 11% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which places it 28th of 42 forces. About 37% of its cases close with nobody identified. That is a measure of what happens after a report is made. It does not measure how much crime there is, and it covers all of Essex, not just Loughton.
On safety, Loughton is ordinary for its part of Essex. It has a shoplifting problem, and nothing else in the figures marks it out from the district around it.