Tavistock is safe in the ordinary sense and still the busiest place for crime in a very quiet district. Its recorded rate runs about a fifth above the West Devon average. Almost nobody here is out of work. Almost nobody is living in an overcrowded home. This is what happens when a town with pubs, shops and a bus station gets measured against parishes that have a postbox and a field.
The published figure from the police is 57 recorded crimes per 1,000 residents in the year to May 2026, covering 820 recorded offences over those twelve months. That sits roughly 21% above the local-authority average. Both numbers are published rates rather than sums anyone should be recalculating at home, since the rate is built on a statistical-area population rather than the resident headcount you would find on a census page.
The comparison is worth seeing in full rather than as a bare adjective. Tavistock records about 57 crimes per 1,000 people. West Devon as a whole records about 47. The gap is real, and it is a gap between a market town and the countryside that surrounds it rather than between one troubled place and one peaceful one.
The texture underneath those numbers is not what most people picture when they hear the phrase above average. Population density across the area averages roughly 2,750 people per square kilometre, unemployment runs at about 2%, and around 2% of households are overcrowded. None of that causes anything on its own. It does describe a town where the pressures usually blamed for crime are close to absent, and where the concentration of everything that opens in the evening does the sorting instead.
On the mix, the largest category is violence and sexual offences at 46% of recorded crime against about 35% across England and Wales. That grouping is broad enough to be almost meaningless without unpacking: it is a statutory bucket that runs from serious offences down to common assault without injury, and it heads the table nearly everywhere in the country. Anti-social behaviour accounts for 13% here against 16% nationally, so lower than the national picture. Criminal damage and arson runs at 10% against 7%. Public order sits at 8% against 7%, other theft at 7% against 7%, and shoplifting at 7% against 8%. Four of those six are within a point or two of the national share, which is the least dramatic sentence in this answer and the most useful one.
What happens after you report something is a separate question with its own answer, and it is a force-wide answer rather than a Tavistock one. Devon and Cornwall Police charged a suspect in about 8% of cases over the twelve months to May 2026, against about 12% nationally, which places the force 42nd out of 42. Around 26% of cases were closed with no suspect identified at all. That says nothing about how safe your street is. It says a good deal about what to expect when you ring in about a stolen bike.
Safety is the softer part of Tavistock's case, not because anything alarming is happening but because the town sets itself against a district that barely registers on the scale. Move here from a city and you will feel the difference immediately. Move here from one of the surrounding parishes and you will notice you have moved somewhere with a Friday night.