Yes, and not by a narrow margin. There were 461 recorded offences across the whole town in a year. The rate sits well under the county's. Unemployment barely registers and overcrowding is rarer still. For somewhere that doubles in population every summer and hands the seafront over to strangers with buckets, the numbers come back remarkably dull.
The published crime rate is about 42 recorded offences per thousand people over the year to May 2026, drawn from the police.uk records for the neighbourhoods covering the town, and it sits roughly 23% below the Dorset average. That is a real gap rather than a rounding artefact. The rate and the count are published separately and measured on different population bases, so the sensible thing is to read the rate as the comparison figure and the count as the sense of scale.
Set against the wider authority, the two numbers look like this: about 42 per thousand here, against about 55 per thousand across Dorset as a whole. Dorset is not a high-crime county to begin with, so being a quarter below it puts this town in the quiet end of a quiet place. Anyone moving here from a city will find the crime map so sparse they will assume it has failed to load.
The texture underneath those numbers is ordinary in the ways that matter. Population density averages about 3,400 people per square kilometre across the town's neighbourhoods, which is town density rather than village density, and denser than the coast-path branding suggests. Unemployment runs at about 2% and overcrowded households at about 2%. None of that explains the crime figures on its own, and nobody should pretend otherwise, but it does describe the kind of place producing them: settled, employed, and not short of space.
On what the offences actually are, the shares need reading carefully because the totals are small enough that a handful of incidents shifts a category by several points. Violence and sexual offences account for about 41% of records here against about 35% nationally, and that heading is a broad statutory grouping covering everything up to and including common assault where nobody was injured. It is the largest category in almost every town in England. Anti-social behaviour runs at about 20% against about 16% nationally. Criminal damage and arson sit at about 9% against about 7%. Shoplifting is about 8% locally and about 8% nationally, effectively identical. Other theft is about 7% both here and across the country, and public order offences run at about 5% locally against about 7% nationally. The honest summary is that the mix looks much like everywhere else, tilted slightly toward the categories a seasonal town generates, and it is not stable enough year to year to be called a characteristic.
What happens after someone reports something is a separate question, and it is answered force-wide rather than street by street. Dorset Police charged a suspect in about 14% of cases over the same twelve months, against about 12% nationally, which ranks the force twelfth of the 42 forces in England and Wales. About 35% of cases were closed with no suspect identified. That last figure is the one worth sitting with, because it is the realistic answer to whether anyone gets caught, and it applies across the whole force area rather than telling you anything about this town specifically. It is also not a safety measure. A place can be extremely safe and still have a modest charge rate, which is exactly the position here.
Safety is the strongest thing this town has going for it after the scenery. The recorded crime rate is well below a county average that was already low, the volume is small enough to read in an afternoon, and the loudest thing most residents deal with is the arcade.