Mere is as safe as the county around it, almost to the decimal point. The recorded crime rate sits a fraction below the Wiltshire average. Fewer than 300 offences were recorded across the whole town in a year. Burglary turns up rather more often here than it does across England and Wales. Safe is a fair word for the place, ordinary is the more honest one.
Over the twelve months to May 2026, 282 crimes were recorded across Mere, giving a published rate of about 61 per thousand. That figure sits roughly 2% below the Wiltshire average, which in practice means level rather than better. Both numbers are published rates calculated on statistical-area populations, so neither is arrived at by dividing the town's offence count by the number of people who live in it, and anyone attempting that sum at home will get a different answer for reasons that have nothing to do with Mere.
The comparison is worth seeing with both numbers on the table rather than as a bare verdict. Mere sits at about 61 per thousand. Wiltshire as a whole sits at about 62. That is the entire gap. A town that markets itself on rural calm might have hoped for a wider one, and the honest reading is that the countryside does not come with a discount on the crime statistics.
The neighbourhood texture behind those numbers is what you would expect of a compact market town rather than a scattered village. Population density averages around 1,860 people per square kilometre across the town's statistical areas, which is town-shaped rather than field-shaped. Unemployment runs at about 2% and overcrowded households at about 1%. Those are descriptions of the place, not explanations of the crime figure, and anyone who wants to draw a causal line between them is doing their own work rather than reading this site's.
On what the offences actually are, the caveat has to come first, because 282 crimes spread across thirteen categories is a small enough base that a handful of incidents moves any share by several points from one year to the next. With that firmly in mind: violence and sexual offences accounted for about 34% of the total against about 35% nationally, which is to say Mere sits exactly where almost everywhere sits on the largest and broadest category in the system, one that covers everything from serious assault to common assault without injury. Anti-social behaviour ran at about 21% against about 16% nationally. Shoplifting was about 10% against about 8%. Criminal damage and arson about 10% against about 7%. Other theft came in at about 7% against a national 7%, which is as close to identical as this data gets. Burglary was about 7% against about 4% nationally, the one category where the local share stands clearly apart from the national picture. None of this is a settled characteristic of the town. It is one year of small numbers.
What happens after a report is a separate question from how much crime there is, and the two should never be read as one. Wiltshire Police charges a suspect in about 10% of cases, against about 12% nationally, placing the force 32nd out of 42. About 34% of cases are closed with no suspect identified at all. That is a force-wide figure covering the whole of Wiltshire rather than anything measured on Mere's streets, and it is the honest answer to the question people actually want answered, which is whether anyone gets caught. Roughly a third of the time, nobody is.
Mere lands in the middle on safety, which is neither the pastoral idyll the brochure implies nor a reason to look elsewhere. The rate is level with the county, the volumes are small, and the one figure worth taking seriously is that burglary claims a larger slice of the total here than it does nationally.