Safer than the district, and not close. Roughly forty-three recorded crimes per thousand residents over the last year. Roughly half the wider district's average. About three hundred and eighty offences across the same window. Quiet by the data, not just by the brochure.
The crime rate of about forty-three offences per thousand residents sits roughly forty-seven percent below the Chichester local-authority average of about eighty-one. That gap is wide enough to matter rather than read as a statistical wobble. The published window runs from April 2025 to March 2026, and the headline volume across it is around three hundred and eighty offences for the village. These are published rates calculated on the statistical-area populations the authorities use, not the village's own resident headcount, so they should not be re-derived by dividing the count by the population, which uses a different denominator and produces a misleading answer. The structural picture matters more than any single ratio. Southbourne is a village of houses, a railway station, an industrial estate, and a harbour. There is no town-centre nightlife strip generating the late-night incidents that drive bigger places' numbers, no high-footfall shopping spine producing the daytime acquisitive volume, and no cluster of pubs feeding the weekend categories. The setting itself thins the opportunities. That does not mean it is empty of incident. Houses get broken into and cars get gone through in the same broad categories any English village's statistics carry. What it means is that the rate is consistent with what a quiet, settled, owner-occupied village in a low-crime council area actually feels like to live in.
Excellent on the safety front, which is what the published data scores it. The kind of place where the noisiest event of an average week is the recycling collection and the scariest item on the parish noticeboard is a planning application. Not bulletproof, because nowhere is, but as close as a settled English village reasonably gets.