Yes, and the published police record is the cleanest evidence for it. Selsey records around 70 crime incidents per thousand residents across the most recent twelve months, which sits about 14% below the Chichester local-authority average. Total volume across the year came to around 760 recorded incidents. The town runs quieter than the wider district, and quieter again than most coastal places of comparable size on the south coast. A peninsula with a median resident age of fifty-seven, one road in, and no town-centre nightlife strip generates the kind of police record that buyers tend to find reassuring. The geography is doing the heavy lifting, and the demographics are not arguing with it.
The crime rate is the figure to anchor on, because it normalises for the local-authority statistical-area population the police record uses, which is not the same number as Selsey's resident headcount. The headline rate sits at about 70 per thousand for the year to March 2026. The Chichester local-authority average for the same window sits closer to 81 per thousand, which is where the roughly 14% gap comes from. Total recorded volume across the year was around 760 incidents on a town of just over five thousand households. That is enough to register as a real-world picture, not so much that it changes the texture of daily life. The wider Chichester local-authority area covers the city itself, the rural villages on the South Downs fringe, and the rest of the Manhood Peninsula. Selsey sits firmly on the quieter half of that spread.
Most of what gets recorded falls at the everyday end of the spectrum: opportunistic, low-stakes, the kind of thing local insurance treats as routine. A retirement-skewed town with a limited night-time economy, one road in and out, and a population mostly already in bed by ten o'clock is not the kind of place that generates the volume or the variety of urban crime. The absence of a railway station, gone since 1935, the lack of a town-centre nightlife strip, and the simple reality that anyone arriving here has chosen to drive a long way off the main road all do their share of the work. The peninsula filters its visitors. The single bridge over the inlet at Pagham Harbour, known locally as the ferry, is also the single exit. There is no commuter crowd swelling and shrinking the daytime population. There is no weekend influx of strangers chasing a nightlife district. The same handful of vehicles pass the same houses at the same times, and the same residents tend to be the ones who notice when something is out of place.
Selsey lands at four out of five for safety, and it lands there because the demographics, the geography, and the police record all push in the same direction. Quiet, not silent. The kind of place where the loudest thing on a Tuesday evening is the wind off the sea, and where the local crime picture sits closer to a rural village than a coastal town.