Pagham is quietly one of the safer places in the Arun district. About 59 crimes per thousand residents over the last 12 months. Roughly 380 recorded incidents in total. Around a third below the wider local-authority rate. Coastal-village safe, not gated-compound safe.
The published crime rate for Pagham runs at around 59 per thousand residents over the year to March 2026, across approximately 380 recorded incidents. The same figure for the Arun local-authority area runs closer to 90 per thousand. Pagham sits around a third below that wider average. The gap is not mysterious. Local-authority crime rates get pulled upward by town centres and seafront strips in the larger settlements within the boundary, and the Arun headline is being carried mostly by Bognor Regis and Littlehampton town centres. Pagham gets quietly priced against that headline by anyone who reads the local-authority figure and stops. The village-level number tells a different story than the local-authority dashboard. Both numbers are real. They are measuring different things.
A note on the maths. The published rate uses a statistical-area population as its denominator, not the resident headcount of the village. Dividing 380 incidents by the village's roughly 6,400 residents does not reproduce the published rate, because the area covered by the published figure is not the same shape as the area covered by the residents-on-the-electoral-roll figure. This is the small print that most informal safety calculations skip, and it is the reason amateur comparisons online tend to argue with themselves. Use the published rate. Do not try to verify it from your own arithmetic, because the arithmetic is using a different denominator without knowing it.
What the published rate does not tell you is which streets contribute disproportionately, which categories dominate the count, or what the month-by-month trend looks like. None of that detail is in this section. None of it should be inferred from the headline rate either. Anyone seriously concerned about safety on a specific street should look at the local police force's neighbourhood crime maps for the most recent quarter, where category and street-level concentrations are published directly. The honest village-level answer stops at the village-level rate, and the village-level rate is well below the area average it is grouped under.
For safety, Pagham scores the top mark. Not because nothing happens here, because things happen in every village, and a village that claims otherwise is either lying or empty. It scores top because by every comparison the available data makes, the village sits below the local-authority average, well below the regional norms, and is not the reason anyone is going to pack up and leave.