Totnes is safe in the ordinary way that small market towns are safe, and its recorded crime rate still runs above the district around it. Around 56 offences per 1,000 residents. The wider district sits closer to 49. Nearly 900 recorded crimes. The reputation and the tally do not quite match, which is worth knowing before somebody assures you that nothing ever happens here.
The police.uk neighbourhood data records 891 crimes across the area in the twelve months to May 2026, giving a published rate of about 56 per 1,000 residents, roughly 16% above the South Hams average. That rate is published as it stands rather than worked out from the resident headcount, because the two use different population bases and mixing them produces a number that looks precise and means nothing.
The South Hams figure itself is about 49 per 1,000. Putting both on the table matters, because this is not a town sitting above a national benchmark. It is a town sitting above a rural district that is, for the most part, not a town.
As for what kind of place produces those figures, population density across the area's neighbourhoods averages about 3,500 people per square kilometre, which is town density dropped into a district of villages and farmland. Unemployment runs at about 2%, and about 2% of households are overcrowded. Those are descriptions of the place, not explanations of the crime figures, and treating them as explanations is how people end up with theories instead of information.
The category mix is more useful than the headline. Violence and sexual offences account for about 41% of recorded crime here against about 35% across England and Wales, and that grouping is a broad statutory one that starts at common assault without injury, so quoting it on its own alarms people rather than informing them. Anti-social behaviour runs at about 13% locally against about 16% nationally, which is lower. Criminal damage and arson is about 10% against about 7%. Shoplifting is about 9% against about 8%, other theft about 9% against about 7%, and public order about 7% locally against about 7% nationally, which is to say indistinguishable.
Then there is what happens after the phone call. Devon and Cornwall Police charged a suspect in about 8% of cases across the whole force over the same twelve months, against about 12% nationally, placing it 42nd out of 42 forces on that measure. About 26% of cases closed with nobody identified at all. That is a force-wide figure with nothing to say about any particular street, and it answers a separate question from the crime rate: not how likely something is to happen to you, but how likely anyone is to answer for it afterwards.
Safety is the softer side of living in Totnes rather than one of its arguments, with a rate above the district's own and a force that follows up less often than most of the country. Nobody sensible would call it a dangerous town. It is a town that records rather more than its gentle reputation would have you expect.