Yes, in the unexciting sense that it is neither better nor worse than the county around it. The rate sits just under the Somerset average. No outlier in either direction. The category headings look worse than the town feels, which is a fact about how crime gets counted rather than a fact about Shepton Mallet. Anyone hoping for a number that proves the place is either spotless or grim is going to leave disappointed twice.
Police recorded 960 crimes here in the twelve months to May 2026, which the published rate puts at about 91 per thousand residents. That rate is built on a statistical population base rather than on dividing one of those figures into the other, so it is worth taking as published rather than as arithmetic to check at the kitchen table.
Somerset as a whole runs at about 93 per thousand over the same period, which leaves Shepton Mallet roughly 2% below the authority it belongs to. Two percent is not a safety margin. It is the width of a rounding difference, and it means the town is ordinary rather than that the town is better.
The texture behind those numbers is townish rather than rural. Population density averages about 4,040 people per square kilometre across the neighbourhoods used for the count, unemployment runs at about 3%, and about 3% of households are overcrowded. None of that explains the crime figures and none of it should be read as producing them, but it does describe the sort of place the figures come from: somewhere most people have work and most households have room to move around in.
On the category split, violence and sexual offences account for about 49% of recorded crime here against about 35% across England and Wales. That heading covers far more ground than the words suggest, running from serious assault down to common assault where nobody was injured, and it is the largest single category almost everywhere. Anti-social behaviour comes in at about 13% locally against about 16% nationally, and criminal damage and arson at about 7% against about 7%, which is close enough to call identical. Public order is the one that leans the other way, about 10% here against about 7% nationally. Shoplifting sits at about 6% against about 8%. Fourteen categories in all, and the shares move in both directions rather than one.
What happens after a report is a force-level question rather than a town-level one. Avon and Somerset Constabulary charges a suspect in about 11% of cases against about 12% nationally, and closes about 30% of cases with nobody identified, over the same twelve months. The force ranks 24th out of 42. None of that measures how safe the streets are. It answers the other question, the one people only think to ask once something has already happened.
Safety here is average, and average is not a polite word for bad. The town tracks its county almost exactly, so the honest verdict is the dull one: no safer than Somerset, no rougher, and anyone pitching it as either is pitching rather than reporting.