Milford on Sea is where crime comes to retire. The recorded crime rate sits at about 28 incidents per thousand residents. That runs roughly 52% below the wider New Forest average. Across the whole village, around 185 crimes were logged over twelve months. Those are not the numbers of a place with a problem. They are the numbers of a place most people move to precisely so they never have to think about this question again.
Put that rate next to the district it belongs to and the gap does the talking. The New Forest as a whole records more than double the crime rate that Milford on Sea does, which drops this village into the safest tier the data has, no asterisks. The 185 incidents were spread across a full year and an entire coastal parish, which is a level of daily disruption somewhere below the average dispute over a garden fence. Whatever those incidents were, they were rare enough that no honest reading of the figures turns them into a pattern, and there is nothing in the numbers that singles out one street, one corner, or one time of night as the bit you avoid. The people who buy here for the quiet are getting exactly what they paid for, and then, in the great tradition of the English coast, checking the online crime map every fortnight to reassure themselves it is still true. It is. New Milton and Lymington up the road can speak for themselves; Milford on Sea keeps its head down and its front doors, statistically speaking, largely unbothered. This is the sort of safety that comes from a settled, long-staying population rather than from gates and cameras, which is the version that actually holds. The risk you plan around here is the weather and the tide, not the person walking behind you.
The verdict is not complicated. Milford on Sea is one of the safest places you could reasonably choose to live on the Hampshire coast, and the crime figures have no interest in pretending otherwise. If your idea of danger is a rough sea and a queue for the good coffee, you will feel very much at home.