Yes, Marlow is safe, and fairly undramatic about it. Crime runs about a fifth below the county rate. Unemployment barely registers. Antisocial behaviour is a smaller slice of the total than it is nationally. The biggest sum most people lose in Marlow is still the one they hand over at completion.
Thames Valley Police recorded 1,073 crimes in Marlow in the year to May 2026, a published rate of about 52 per 1,000 residents. That is roughly 21% below the Buckinghamshire average. The figure counts everything reported, from a stolen bike to an assault, so it measures how often the police are called here and nothing about any one street.
Across Buckinghamshire as a whole, the rate over the same twelve months was about 65 per 1,000, against Marlow's 52. Somewhere in the county the extra crime is being recorded, and it isn't happening around the bottom of the High Street.
The neighbourhoods behind those numbers are dense for a market town, at about 3,800 people per square kilometre on average, with unemployment around 2% and about 2% of households overcrowded. That is a compact, employed town where almost everyone has room to live, and the crime figures look like that kind of place.
Violence and sexual offences make up about 39% of recorded crime here, against about 35% across England and Wales. That category is the largest almost everywhere and covers a wide legal range, including common assault where nobody was hurt, so the local share is a few points above the national one and in line with what most towns record. Other theft is about 12% of the total against about 7% nationally, the clearest gap in the list. Antisocial behaviour is about 11% against 16% nationally, shoplifting about 9% against 8%, criminal damage and arson about 8% against 7%, and public order offences about 6% against 7%. For a town with a two-Michelin-star pub on West Street and a regatta every June, the unattended handbag is a bigger worry than the late-night crowd.
Once a crime is reported, Thames Valley Police charges a suspect in about 9% of cases across its whole area, against about 12% nationally, which puts it 37th of 42 forces. About 37% of its cases close with no suspect identified. That is a force-wide figure for what happens after a crime, made at headquarters, and it has no bearing on how likely anything is to happen in Marlow in the first place. It does mean that if the bike goes, the bike has probably gone.
Safety is one of Marlow's real strengths: crime well below the county's, few of the warning signs that usually travel with it, and the main weak point is in what the police do afterwards, which is the force's problem more than the town's.