Teignmouth is an ordinary, low-drama town for crime, sitting a little above the average for the district around it. Recorded offences run slightly higher than the villages nearby. Unemployment is low. Overcrowding is rare. The number worth your attention here is not how much gets reported to the police, which is unremarkable, but how little of it ends with anyone being charged.
Police records for the year to May 2026 hold 1,190 recorded crimes for Teignmouth, and the published rate works out at about 67 offences per 1,000 residents. That sits roughly 9% above the average for Teignbridge, the district the town belongs to. Both of those are published figures calculated on the statistical population base the police use, which is not the same base as the resident headcount, so the rate is the figure to quote rather than anything worked out on the back of an envelope.
The comparison is worth seeing in full rather than as a bare word. Teignbridge as a whole records about 61 offences per 1,000 residents. Teignmouth records about 67. Six per thousand is the gap between a town with a high street, a station, a harbour and a night-time economy, and a district average that includes a lot of places where the most exciting thing on a Tuesday is the recycling collection.
The texture underneath those numbers is unremarkable in the way that reassures. Across the town's neighbourhoods, population density averages about 4,840 people per square kilometre, which is proper town density rather than village spread. Unemployment sits at about 2%, and about 2% of households are overcrowded. None of that explains the crime figure, and it is not offered as an explanation. It describes a settled, working, largely employed town rather than one under strain.
The category split is where most people frighten themselves unnecessarily. Violence and sexual offences make up 44% of recorded crime here, against about 35% nationally. That category is a broad statutory grouping that includes common assault with no injury, and it is the largest single category almost everywhere in England and Wales, so the headline share needs reading with that in mind rather than on its own. Below it, anti-social behaviour accounts for 13% locally against about 16% nationally, criminal damage and arson 9% against 7%, shoplifting 8% against 8%, other theft 8% against 7%, and public order 7% against 7%. Four of those five are within a point or two of the national share, which is the least dramatic sentence on this page and the most useful one.
What happens after a report is a different question, and it is not a measure of how safe the streets are. Devon and Cornwall Police, the force covering this area, charged a suspect in about 8% of cases over the twelve months to May 2026, against about 12% nationally. That places the force 42nd out of the 42 forces in England and Wales. In about 26% of cases, the file was closed with no suspect identified at all. Those are force-wide decisions taken across two counties, and they carry no signal about Teignmouth specifically, but they are the honest answer to the question people actually mean when they ask whether anyone gets caught.
Safety here is middling in the most literal sense: a bit above the district average, a bit below the national alarm level, and driven by the sort of town-centre activity that comes with actually having a town centre. Walking home from the seafront on a Friday is not a decision that needs data. Reporting a bike theft and expecting a result is where the disappointment lives, and that is the force's problem rather than the town's.