Less safe than the district around it, and the gap is not a rounding error. Recorded crime here runs roughly four in ten higher than the wider district average. Unemployment is low. Overcrowding is rare. This is not a town in trouble; it is a small town doing the job of a much larger one and getting the paperwork for it.
The published police.uk figures for the year to May 2026 record 2,058 offences in the town, a rate of about 84 crimes per thousand people. That sits roughly 38% above the Mid Devon average. Both numbers are published rather than calculated here, and they use a statistical population base rather than a simple headcount, so anyone trying to reverse-engineer one from the other will get a different answer and the wrong idea.
The comparison is worth seeing in full rather than as a percentage. Mid Devon as a whole records about 60 crimes per thousand people. Tiverton records about 84. The district it is being measured against is one of the emptiest in England, made mostly of farmland and villages, and Tiverton is the bit of it with shops, a bus station and somewhere to go on a Friday. A market town will always look bad next to the fields it serves.
What the rest of the numbers describe is not a distressed place. Population density averages about 4,060 people per square kilometre across the town's neighbourhoods, which is properly urban by Devon standards and reflects a compact centre rather than a spread-out one. Unemployment sits at about 2%. Overcrowded households sit at about 2% as well. Those are descriptive figures rather than explanations, and they are not the profile of somewhere with a structural problem.
On what the offences actually are, the mix needs both sides of the comparison to mean anything. Violence and sexual offences account for about 43% of recorded crime locally against about 35% nationally, and that category is a broad statutory grouping that runs from serious assault down to common assault without injury, which is why it tops the list almost everywhere in England and Wales. Anti-social behaviour is about 17% locally against about 16% nationally, which is effectively the same. Other theft at about 6% against 7%, shoplifting at about 6% against 8%, and public order at about 5% against 7% all sit at or below the national share. The genuine outlier is criminal damage and arson: about 12% of recorded crime here against about 7% nationally.
The other half of the question is what happens after somebody reports something, and this is a force-level matter rather than a Tiverton one. Over the same twelve months to May 2026, Devon and Cornwall Police charged a suspect in about 8% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which places the force 42nd out of the 42 forces in England and Wales on that measure. About 26% of cases closed with nobody identified at all. That says nothing about how safe any particular street is, and it says a great deal about what to expect from the follow-up call.
Safety is the weakest thing about Tiverton after the water. The town is not dangerous in any way a resident would recognise from walking around it, but it carries a genuinely higher recorded crime rate than the countryside it sits in, and the odds of anyone being charged for it are the worst in the country.