Takeley and Little Canfield has a high recorded crime rate for a village of new estates, and a buyer should take that seriously. Recorded crime runs at about three times the district rate. Theft is unusually common in the mix. Violence makes up less of it than it does nationally. Part of an airport is inside the parish, and the published figures don't separate the airport's crime from the village's.
Police.uk recorded 1,764 crimes across the built-up area in the twelve months from June 2025 to May 2026, a published rate of about 202 crimes for every 1,000 residents. That is roughly 227% above the average for Uttlesford as a whole. The rate is calculated on the population of the statistical areas the crimes fall in, and here those areas include part of Stansted Airport, so the village's residents are being measured against crimes at the terminal as well as on their own streets. Police.uk's map shows where each crime was recorded, to the nearest street point, and looking at the streets around a particular house is the quickest way to see whether that house is near the clusters or well away from them.
The district gives the comparison. Uttlesford as a whole records about 62 crimes per 1,000 residents, against about 202 here. The rest of the district is mostly villages and market towns without a runway, so the comparison is between this parish and places with no airport traffic at all.
The neighbourhood itself is not what usually produces a crime figure like this. Across its statistical areas, the village averages about 3,060 people per square kilometre, a built-up place compared with the scattered hamlets around it. Unemployment was about 3% at the 2021 census, and about 2% of households were overcrowded. Those figures describe a settled, employed, roomy village. They don't explain the crime count, and nothing in them suggests the cause is on the residential streets.
The crime mix is where this place differs. Violence and sexual offences, the biggest category almost everywhere and a broad legal grouping that includes common assault without injury, make up about 23% of crime here against about 35% across England and Wales. "Other theft", which covers property taken without burglary, robbery or a vehicle involved, accounts for about 18% here against about 7% nationally, the clearest difference in the list. Anti-social behaviour, at 17% against 16%, and shoplifting, at 8% against 8%, are close to the national shares. Vehicle crime is about 7% against 5%, and criminal damage and arson about 6% against 7%. That is the mix of a place where people leave bags and cars unattended, more than of one where people get hurt.
Essex Police, the force covering the area, charges a suspect in about 11% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which puts it 28th of the 42 forces. About 37% of the force's cases close with no suspect identified. These are force-wide figures for the whole of Essex, and they describe what happens after a crime is reported, which has nothing to do with how likely a crime is here. For anyone who has had a bag taken from a car park, it means the bag is unlikely to come back.
On the published figures Takeley and Little Canfield is not a safe area, and the airport doesn't make that number go away. Many of the crimes behind it are thefts of property left unattended, so the danger to residents is lower than the headline rate suggests.