Stevenage is a safe place by ordinary standards, and slightly safer than the borough it belongs to. Its crime rate comes in a little under the borough average. The kinds of crime recorded look much like the national pattern. No single category stands out. The headline category that sounds frightening is the largest one almost everywhere.
Hertfordshire Constabulary recorded 10,967 crimes across Stevenage in the year from June 2025 to May 2026, a published rate of about 112 per 1,000 residents. That puts it roughly 5% below the borough average. The force's own street-level crime map shows reports a few months back, road by road, and it is the place to check the streets around a specific house, because no town-wide average can.
The borough-wide rate is about 119 crimes per 1,000 residents, against about 112 for Stevenage itself. The built-up town is most of the borough, so Stevenage is largely being compared with itself, and coming in slightly ahead of yourself is a modest win.
Stevenage is densely built, averaging about 5,900 people per square kilometre across its neighbourhoods. At the 2021 census, unemployment was about 3% and about 5% of households were overcrowded. That is the texture of a busy working town, put up after the war to fit a lot of homes and jobs into a small space.
By category, violence and sexual offences made up about 40% of recorded crime in Stevenage, against about 35% nationally. That category covers a wide legal range, down to common assault where nobody was hurt, and it is the largest category almost everywhere. Anti-social behaviour was about 17% here against 16% nationally. Shoplifting was about 8% in both, and other theft, public order offences and criminal damage each made up about 7%, within a point of the national share in every case. Apart from a few points more in the violence category, the mix is the national average, and any sales pitch claiming Stevenage has a crime type all of its own is not backed by the numbers.
What happens after a report is a county matter. Across the twelve months to May 2026, Hertfordshire Constabulary charged a suspect in about 11% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which puts it 23rd of 42 forces. About 40% of its cases were closed with no suspect identified. Those are force-wide outcomes, and they measure how often the police solve crimes, which is a different thing from how much crime there is. The town has helped with detection before. The twin poachers Albert and Ebenezer Fox were studied in jail by the police commissioner Edward Henry to confirm his theory that fingerprints could identify criminals.
Stevenage's worst recorded crime wave is still James Whitney's gang of highwaymen, who robbed travellers along what is now Six Hills Way until he was hanged at Newgate in 1693. Today's figures are much more ordinary: a busy town with slightly less crime than its own borough average, and a crime mix you could find almost anywhere.