Tilbury is one of the less safe places in Thurrock, with recorded crime running roughly four in ten above the borough rate. Violence lands about where it does nationally. Damage to property and crime against cars run well above it. The town is dense and close-packed, and the numbers come with that territory. Safety is the weak spot here, and the figures leave little room to argue.
Police.uk recorded 2,165 crimes in Tilbury in the year from June 2025 to May 2026, a published rate of about 146 per 1,000 residents. That rate is roughly 43% above the average for Thurrock as a whole over the same twelve months.
Set side by side, the borough's own rate was about 102 crimes per 1,000 residents against Tilbury's 146. Thurrock is the yardstick here, and the gap is wide enough that a few incidents either way would barely move it.
Tilbury is a crowded place by any measure. The average density across its neighbourhoods is about 9,390 people per square kilometre, about 11% of households are overcrowded and about 5% of residents were unemployed at the 2021 census. The streets were laid out for dock workers in the late nineteenth century, close together and close to the river, and the town still lives at that kind of density. None of those figures explains a single crime on its own, but they describe the kind of neighbourhood producing the numbers.
The mix is where Tilbury differs from the country. Violence and sexual offences, a broad legal category that includes common assault without injury, make up about 36% of crime here against about 35% across England and Wales, so on that measure Tilbury is entirely typical. Anti-social behaviour is about 14% against 16% nationally, and shoplifting about 5% against 8%, both below the national share. The two that stand out are criminal damage and arson, about 13% against 7%, and vehicle crime, about 11% against 5%. Henry VIII built a fort on this bank to keep invaders out of the Thames. These days the threat lands mostly on parked cars and front windows. The police.uk street map shows recorded crime by location month by month, and it is worth pulling up for the exact road before a viewing, because the picture shifts from one end of a town like this to the other.
Charging decisions are made across the whole of Essex Police, and the force charged a suspect in about 11% of cases in the year to May 2026, against about 12% nationally, which puts it 28th of 42 forces. About 37% of the force's cases were closed with no suspect identified at all. That describes what happens after a report across the county. It says nothing about how often anything happens in Tilbury in the first place.
Tilbury is a poor bet for anyone putting safety first, with a crime rate well clear of its own borough and a particular weakness for damage to cars and property. Buyers who come anyway should come with off-road parking and their eyes open.