Stow-on-the-Wold looks like the safest town in Gloucestershire, and its crime figures say otherwise. Its rate is more than a third above the Cotswold district average. Anti-social behaviour turns up at about twice its national share. Burglary is higher than you would expect too. The numbers behind all of this are small, though, and a handful of incidents can move them a long way.
In the year to May 2026, police recorded 105 crimes in Stow, a published rate of about 55 per 1,000 residents. That is about 37% above the average for Cotswold district. The rate uses the population of the statistical area the police count, which is not quite the same as the town's population, so it should be read as published and not recalculated from the two numbers.
The Cotswold district as a whole runs at about 40 crimes per 1,000 residents over the same year, against Stow's 55. In a district made mostly of villages and farmland, that gap is large enough to make Stow one of the busier places on the police map.
Stow packs in about 1,825 people per square kilometre, which is crowded for a hilltop town surrounded by fields. Unemployment was about 2% and overcrowding about 1% at the 2021 Census. Neither the jobs figure nor the housing figure looks anything like a place in trouble.
Anti-social behaviour made up about 31% of Stow's recorded crime, against about 16% across England and Wales. Violence and sexual offences, the broad legal category that includes common assault without injury and is the largest almost everywhere, made up about 28% here, below the national 35%. Burglary was about 9% against about 4% nationally. Shoplifting at about 9%, other theft at about 8% and criminal damage at about 7% were all close to their national shares. With 105 crimes in total, a few incidents in one category can move its share by several points, so this is one year's picture and may not hold. To see where the incidents actually cluster, look up the specific street on the police's street-level crime map for the months on record. A town this compact can have a busy square and calm closes a few hundred metres apart.
Charging is decided by the force as a whole, not by the town. Gloucestershire Constabulary charged a suspect in about 9% of cases over the year to May 2026, against about 12% nationally. About 33% of its cases were closed without anyone being identified. Neither figure measures how safe Stow is. They tell you what usually happens after you report something, and the answer is that an alarm on the house is more likely to protect you than a prosecution.
Stow is safe enough to live in, but it records more crime than you would guess from looking at it, and well above the rest of the district.