Mostly, with a headline number that needs unpacking. The published crime rate runs at about sixty-six incidents per thousand residents over the last twelve months. That sits roughly thirty-four percent above the East Hampshire average. Around two hundred and eighty-six recorded incidents across the year. A rural-fringe commuter village wrapped around a green is not what a number like that usually conjures, which is the gap worth closing before drawing conclusions.
On the level itself, the figure to quote is the published one: about sixty-six recorded crimes per thousand residents over the rolling twelve months, against an East Hampshire local-authority average of about fifty per thousand. That is the roughly thirty-four percent gap, and it is real. The twelve-month volume sits at around two hundred and eighty-six recorded incidents across the area the figure covers. Both numbers are published as they stand and should be read as they stand.
The context that matters is what the local-authority average is being measured against. East Hampshire is a large rural district stretched across a lot of low-population countryside, with deprivation concentrated in one corner and prosperity spread across the rest of the patch. A district average of fifty per thousand is being held down by parishes that record almost nothing in a year. Against that floor, anywhere with an actual recorded incident or two ends up sitting meaningfully above the headline, and a village with a railway station, a country park and through-traffic to other settlements is not going to record nothing. The thirty-four percent gap is the figure, but it is the gap between a small recorded number and a smaller recorded number, not the gap between a town and a quiet village.
The other context is the statistical base. The published rate is calculated against a particular population denominator for the area it covers, which is not the same as taking the recorded count and dividing it by the village's three and a quarter thousand residents. The rate and the count are reported as they are, and the right way to read them is as the figures the local police force publishes for the area, not as a calculation to be redone with a different population number plugged in. That matters because in a small place a handful of additional recorded incidents in a year can move the rate around in a way that looks dramatic and represents something close to nothing in lived terms.
What the figures do not tell you, and what no rate or count will tell you, is what kind of crime is being recorded where. The number is a rate of all recorded incidents, not a measure of violent or residential crime specifically. For a village whose pitch is the railway station, the green, the country-park surroundings and the price tag that filters the demographic to a particular sort of buyer, the mix is unlikely to be the same as it would be in a town centre, but the brief carries no street-level breakdown, and inventing one would be the wrong move.
Verdict: below average, two out of five, and the rating is doing the honest thing of refusing to round up to comfortable when the headline runs thirty-four percent above the local-authority figure. This is not a place to walk away from on safety grounds. It is a place where the headline number deserves the context that comes with it, and where the lived experience for most residents most days will sit nearer the village you can see than the rate the table prints.