Yes, and unremarkably so, which is the good kind of safe. Around 370 recorded offences across a whole year, spread over a wide rural area. That runs about a fifth below the county average. Numbers that small move on a single bad weekend. This is not a place with a crime story, it is a place where the crime story is whatever happened last month and got retold at the shop.
The published rate for the Shrewton area is about 51 recorded crimes per thousand residents over the twelve months to May 2026, from 370 offences recorded by police.uk across the local statistical areas. That sits roughly 18% below the Wiltshire average. Both of those are published figures calculated on the police's own population base, so the rate is not something you can reconstruct by dividing the offence count by the number of people who live here, and anyone who tries will get a different answer and believe it.
The comparison is worth seeing in full rather than as a bare adjective. Wiltshire as a whole records about 62 crimes per thousand residents over the same period. Shrewton and the villages around it record about 51. That is a real gap rather than a rounding difference, and it is the gap that does most of the work when people say the countryside feels safer.
What produces numbers like that is mostly geography. The area averages about 342 people per square kilometre, which on Salisbury Plain means fields between the houses rather than houses between the houses. Unemployment sits at around 2% and overcrowded households at around 2%. None of those figures causes anything on their own, and treating them as an explanation is the sort of reasoning that makes people say daft things at dinner parties. They are texture: this is a spread-out, settled, employed sort of place, and it behaves like one.
The mix of what gets recorded is where a rural area diverges from the national shape, and it comes with a warning attached, because the totals are small enough that a handful of incidents shifts a share by several points. Over the same twelve months, violence and sexual offences accounted for about 31% of recorded crime here against roughly 35% across England and Wales, which is close enough to call ordinary, and it is a broad statutory grouping that includes common assault without injury. Anti-social behaviour ran at about 12% locally against roughly 16% nationally. The categories that sit higher than the national shape are the property ones: criminal damage and arson at about 14% against roughly 7%, other theft at about 11% against roughly 7%, burglary at about 10% against roughly 4%, and vehicle crime at about 9% against roughly 5%. Detached houses with outbuildings, long driveways and no passing footfall are a known shape of target, and the mix reflects that. It is a snapshot of one year in a small area, not a settled characteristic of the village.
What happens after a report is a separate question from how much happens, and the honest answer is less comfortable. Wiltshire Police charges a suspect in about 10% of cases against roughly 12% nationally, which ranks the force 32nd of the 42 in England and Wales over the twelve months to May 2026. About 34% of cases close with no suspect identified at all. Those are force-wide figures rather than this village's own, and they measure the response rather than the risk. Reporting a stolen trailer here is still worth doing. Expecting a conviction from it is a different matter.
Safety is one of the stronger reasons to be here, with the caveat that quiet places invite a particular kind of carelessness. Lock the shed, and the numbers will keep flattering the village.