Yes, Shoreham is broadly safe, and the published crime figures put it inside the ordinary band for a south-coast town of its size. The rate for the year to March 2026 comes in at about seventy-three offences per thousand residents. That sits close to five percent above the local-authority average, which places Shoreham in the middle of the Adur district, not at either end of it. A town this size will always carry base-level statistical noise on its crime figures, and Shoreham's is neither exceptionally low nor high enough to raise alarms. The map is a better guide than the headline it produces.
The published rate is a specific figure calculated a specific way. About one thousand eight hundred incidents were recorded in the twelve months to March 2026, and the seventy-three-per-thousand rate is what the police publish against a small-area population base, not against a whole-town denominator. Nobody dividing the raw incident count by the town's population will get the same number, and nobody who does that arithmetic is doing the police's arithmetic. The published figure is the one to compare against the neighbouring towns' published figures, and Shoreham lands in the same broad band the rest of them do. The window is a rolling twelve months to the most recent quarter, which covers a normal spread of the year. The pattern is what a town this size shows, not a spike.
Five percent above the district average sounds worse than it reads. The district in question is Adur, which is small and coastal and includes settlements that carry quieter numbers because they are still the villages Shoreham used to be. Being five percent above them puts Shoreham where a town with a working port and streets full of shops and pubs should statistically sit. Above-average is the phrase that scares buyers who have not looked at the average. Property listings will describe the same street as quiet or as lively depending on who wrote the listing, and the published crime map is a better guide than either. The map is worth checking against the specific streets an address sits on, because it is honest about where activity concentrates. Anyone buying somewhere with a licensed venue below the flat is looking at a different Saturday night from someone buying on the residential streets further out. Both live inside the same overall town figure, and both live inside the same broadly-safe range. The rate cannot tell you what happens on your specific street, but the map can.
Middle of the road on the safety picture, which is the honest verdict. Shoreham is a town where the crime numbers behave the way a working coastal town's numbers should, and where the address matters more than the town-wide average. Read the street, not the headline.