Not as safe as the harbour photographs suggest, and this is the weakest thing about the place. Recorded crime runs roughly a third above the county's rate. Violence and sexual offences take a bigger share of the total here than they do nationally. Charges, when a crime is reported, are the exception rather than the rule. A small seaside town can have an ugly incident sheet, and this one does.
Police.uk recorded 669 crimes in this area in the twelve months to May 2026, which works out at a published rate of about 97 per 1,000 residents. That sits roughly 31% above the average for Cornwall, the local authority this area belongs to. The rate is published at neighbourhood level and uses its own statistical population base, so it is not the sort of thing to recalculate at home from the headline count.
Set the two side by side and the gap is plain. Cornwall as a whole records about 74 crimes per 1,000 residents over the same twelve months. St Ives records about 97. Nothing about the coastline or the granite explains that away.
The neighbourhood texture is worth knowing, because it is not the texture people expect from these numbers. The area averages roughly 3,700 residents per square kilometre, which is town density rather than village density, packed into a small footprint. Unemployment sits at about 2% and overcrowded households at about 2%, both low. This is a dense, employed, uncrowded town that nonetheless posts a high crime rate, and none of those three measures is doing the causing.
On what gets recorded, violence and sexual offences account for about 50% of crimes here against about 35% across England and Wales. That category is a wide statutory grouping that includes common assault without injury, so it is the largest category almost everywhere and the local share is what stands out rather than its presence. Anti-social behaviour makes up about 18% here against about 16% nationally, which is close to par. Criminal damage and arson sit at about 9% against about 7%. Shoplifting runs the other way, about 4% here against about 8% nationally, which is one of the few categories where this town looks quiet by comparison.
What happens after a report is a separate question, and the answer is not encouraging. Devon and Cornwall Police charge a suspect in about 8% of cases against about 12% nationally, over the same twelve months, and the force ranks 42nd of 42 forces on that measure. About 26% of cases close with nobody identified at all. Those are force-wide decisions rather than anything specific to these streets, and a charge rate says nothing about how safe a street is. It answers the different and blunter question of whether reporting something will lead anywhere.
Safety is the poorest part of the case for living here: a crime rate meaningfully above the county's, a violence share above the national one, and a force that charges less often than most. That does not make the town frightening to walk through, but anyone treating a pretty harbour as a proxy for a quiet incident sheet is reading the wrong document.