Yes, and by a clear margin on the numbers. Recorded crime sits below the district average. The town is quiet, low on unemployment and almost free of overcrowded housing. What lets the side down is not the crime rate but the clear-up rate, because the force covering this stretch of coast charges suspects less often than any other in England and Wales. Pleasant place to live, frustrating place to be burgled.
Recorded crime in Seaton came to 422 offences in the year to May 2026, and the published rate over that same period works out at about 41 offences per 1,000 residents. That is roughly 17% below the East Devon average. Both are published figures using different population bases, so the rate is the number to quote and not something to be checked with a calculator against the count.
Put side by side, East Devon as a whole records about 50 offences per 1,000 residents while Seaton records about 41, for the same twelve months. A district average is not a high bar in this part of the country, and Seaton still sits comfortably underneath it.
The kind of place producing those numbers is what you would guess from a walk around. The built-up area averages about 3,270 people per square kilometre, which is denser than the picture-postcard version of a Devon coastal town but nothing like a city. Unemployment sits at about 2% and overcrowded households at about 1%. None of those figures causes anything on its own, and anybody claiming a direct line from one to the other is selling something.
The mix of what gets recorded needs handling carefully, because 422 offences across 13 categories is a small enough base that a handful of incidents shifts a share by several points. On those caveated numbers, violence and sexual offences account for 49% of recorded crime against about 35% nationally, which sounds worse than it reads: the category is a broad statutory grouping that takes in common assault without injury, and it is the largest category in almost every part of the country. Other theft comes to about 10% against about 7% nationally. Anti-social behaviour runs at just under 10% here against about 16% nationally, which is one of the few places the local mix looks clearly different from the national one. Burglary at about 5% against about 4% nationally, and public order at about 5% against about 7%, are close enough to national shares that the gap is not worth reading into. None of this should be treated as a fixed characteristic of the town.
Then there is the part nobody puts in the brochure. Devon and Cornwall Police charged a suspect in about 8% of cases over the year to May 2026, against about 12% nationally, and closed about 26% of cases with no suspect identified at all. The force ranks last of the 42 forces in England and Wales on that charge rate. This answers a different question from the crime rate and should never be blended with it: charging decisions are made across the whole force area, and none of it says anything about which street in Seaton you buy on. It does say that the chance of something happening to you here is below average, and the chance of anyone being charged for it afterwards is the worst in the country.
Safety is one of the stronger reasons to buy here. Fewer things happen than in the district around it, the texture of the place is quiet rather than fortified, and the honest caveat is about what the justice system does next rather than about your front door.