Middleton Cheney is a safe place to live, and its crime rate is well below the district around it. Crime here runs at under half the rate of the wider council area. A typical year brings in a few hundred incidents at most. Unemployment and overcrowding are almost nonexistent. Anyone looking for a reason to worry will have to bring their own.
Police.uk records for the year to May 2026 show 158 crimes in Middleton Cheney, a published rate of about 36 per 1,000 residents. That puts the village roughly 62% below the West Northamptonshire average.
The district as a whole ran at about 95 crimes per 1,000 residents over the same twelve months, against Middleton Cheney's 36. Banbury does the late nights and the busy car parks for this corner of the map, and the village's figures reflect a place that goes home afterwards.
The built-up part of the village averages about 2,809 people per square kilometre, so it is a compact place of closes and cul-de-sacs, with houses close enough together to keep an eye on each other. Unemployment is about 1%, and so is overcrowding. These describe the kind of neighbourhood the crime figures come from, and neither number is an explanation for them.
The mix needs handling with care, because 158 incidents is a small total and a handful of reports can shift any share by several points. Violence and sexual offences make up about 35% of the total, almost exactly the 35% seen nationally, and that broad legal category includes common assault where nobody was hurt. Anti-social behaviour accounts for about 27%, against 16% nationally, and public order about 11% against 7%. Shoplifting is about 6% against 8%, burglary about 4% against 4%, and other theft about 4% against 7%. On a base this size, a couple of noisy summers could put the anti-social behaviour figure where it is, and a quiet year could take it back down. The police.uk street map shows where reports cluster around any address you are considering, and it costs nothing to look.
What happens after a report is a separate question from how much crime there is. Across its whole area, Northamptonshire Police charges a suspect in about 11% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which places it 26th of 42 forces. About 36% of its cases close with no suspect identified. Those are force-wide outcomes, and a village with this little crime gives the charge rate very few cases to work on.
Safety is one of the places where Middleton Cheney is clearly at its best, and the district's crime figures happen mostly somewhere else.