Not especially, and the numbers leave little room for spin. Recorded crime here runs roughly a third above the district average. That comes to about eighty crimes for every thousand residents. The district it gets measured against is mostly villages, farmland and the edge of the moor. A town compared with countryside loses that contest every time, which explains part of the gap and none of the experience of living with it.
The published police.uk figure for the neighbourhood areas covering the town is about 84 crimes per 1,000 people in the year to May 2026, sitting roughly 36% above the Teignbridge average. The volume behind that rate is 2,690 recorded crimes over the same twelve months. Both are published figures rather than anything worked out here, and the rate is calculated on a statistical-area population base, so it is not the crime count divided by the number of people who live in the town.
For the comparison in full, Teignbridge as a whole records about 61 crimes per 1,000 people over that same year. Eighty-four against sixty-one is the actual shape of the thing. It is a real gap and it is not a chasm, and putting both numbers on the table is more useful than the phrase "above average" doing its usual work of meaning whatever the reader fears most.
For texture, the neighbourhoods here average around 4,400 people per square kilometre, which makes this a compact town rather than a spread-out one. Unemployment sits at about 2% and overcrowded households at about 2%. Those are descriptive facts about the place, not an explanation of the crime figure, and anyone joining those dots is doing it without help from the numbers.
On what the recorded crime consists of, violence and sexual offences account for about 46% of it against about 35% across England and Wales. That category does most of the frightening on any published crime map, because it is a statutory grouping wide enough to include common assault without injury alongside things nobody would put in the same sentence, so the share is a classification fact before it is a street fact. Shoplifting runs at about 10% here against about 8% nationally. Anti-social behaviour sits at about 14% against about 16% nationally, slightly below. Criminal damage and arson at about 8% against 7%, other theft at about 6% against 7% and public order at about 5% against 7% are all close enough to the national shares to be unremarkable.
What happens after a report is a separate question with an uncomfortable answer. Devon and Cornwall Police charges a suspect in about 8% of cases, against about 12% nationally, over the twelve months to May 2026, which places the force 42nd out of 42 forces on that measure. About 26% of cases close with nobody identified at all. That is a force-wide statistic covering everything from Land's End to the Somerset border rather than anything about this town specifically, and it measures what follows a crime rather than how likely one is. Both things can be true and neither improves the other.
Of everything a buyer weighs up here, this is the item that argues against the place. It is not a town that feels dangerous to live in, but recorded crime sits clearly above the district it belongs to, and safety is the soft spot in an otherwise reasonable case for moving here.