No, not by the numbers, and pretending otherwise would be doing you a disservice. Recorded crime here runs well above the Cornwall average. Violence sits higher than the national share. The force that covers it charges a suspect less often than forces elsewhere. None of that describes a dangerous town so much as a small resort carrying a night-time economy built for a population several times its own.
Police.uk recorded about 106 crimes per thousand residents across the area in the year to May 2026, from 2,907 recorded offences. That published rate sits roughly 43% above the local-authority average. Both figures come from the same source and the same twelve months, so the gap is a real comparison rather than an artefact of timing.
The comparison is starker with the other number in front of you. Cornwall as a whole recorded about 74 crimes per thousand residents over that period. Newquay's 106 is the town's own figure, and the distance between the two is the single least comfortable fact on this page.
The texture of the place does not obviously explain it. Population density across the area averages around 4,200 people per square kilometre, which is town rather than city. Unemployment runs at about 3%. Overcrowded households make up roughly 2%. Those are the markers of an ordinary working town, not of somewhere in trouble, which is why the crime figure sits so awkwardly beside them.
The mix is worth reading properly, because the headline category always sounds worse than it is. Violence and sexual offences account for about 47% of recorded crime here against roughly 35% nationally, and that is a broad statutory grouping that runs from serious assault down to common assault without injury. It is the largest category almost everywhere in England and Wales. Anti-social behaviour makes up about 14% locally against around 16% nationally, which is slightly below the national picture rather than above it. Criminal damage and arson sit at roughly 9% against about 7%, and other theft at around 9% against roughly 7%. Public order is close to the national share at about 6% against 7%. Shoplifting is notably lower here, around 4% against about 8% nationally. So the elevated categories are the ones you would expect in a town with a concentrated late-night strip, and the retail-crime problem that afflicts other places is smaller.
What happens after a report is a separate question, and it is a force-wide one rather than a Newquay one. Devon and Cornwall Police charged a suspect in about 8% of cases over the twelve months to May 2026, against roughly 12% nationally, which places the force last of the 42 in England and Wales on that measure. About 26% of cases were closed with no suspect identified. That says something about resourcing and case outcomes across two large rural counties. It says nothing about which street you should buy on, and it should not be folded into the crime rate as though the two measure the same thing.
Safety is Newquay's weakest dimension by a distance, and the honest framing is that a town of this size is absorbing the policing load of a much larger one every summer. Live here and you will probably find the residential streets uneventful. That is a reasonable expectation to hold and a poor thing to bet a purchase on without reading the figures first.