Twickenham is reasonably safe, and a little less so than the rest of its borough. Recorded crime runs somewhat above the Richmond upon Thames average. Cars and property take more of it than people do. Violence is a smaller share than the national norm. It is a comfortable suburb in a borough that sets an unusually high bar for comfort.
Police records for the year from June 2025 to May 2026 show 2,912 crimes in Twickenham, a published rate of about 83 per 1,000 residents. That is roughly 12% above the average for Richmond upon Thames as a whole. Both figures are the published ones, calculated on the statistical areas the police data uses.
Richmond upon Thames as a whole recorded about 74 crimes per 1,000 residents over the same year, against Twickenham's 83. The gap is real but modest. It is also measured against one of the calmer boroughs in London, so the borough average is not a low bar to sit just above.
Twickenham packs in about 8,600 people per square kilometre, which is dense for somewhere that thinks of itself as a suburb. Fewer than three in a hundred residents were unemployed at the 2021 census, and just over three in a hundred households were overcrowded. Busy streets, a town centre and a stream of visitors give crime more to work with than a cul-de-sac does, and none of those figures explains the rate on its own. The watch house that once stood in the middle of the town came with stocks, a pillory and a whipping post. Policing has since dropped the furniture and kept the forms.
Over that year, violence and sexual offences made up under a quarter of Twickenham's recorded crime, against about 35% across England and Wales. That category is the largest almost everywhere and covers everything up to common assault without injury, and here it is well below the national share. Anti-social behaviour was about a fifth of the total, against 16% nationally. Criminal damage and arson came to 13% against 7%, and vehicle crime to 10% against 5%. Shoplifting, at seven and a half per cent against about 8%, and other theft, at 7% against 7%, were close to the national pattern. In Twickenham, the thing most likely to be on the receiving end is the car parked outside, not the person who owns it. Police.uk publishes a street-level crime map, so you can see whether that pattern holds on the road you are looking at.
The Metropolitan Police Service charges a suspect in about 10% of cases, against about 12% nationally. That puts it 33rd of 42 forces, and about 53% of its cases are closed with no suspect identified. Those are force-wide figures for all of London, decided centrally, and they answer whether anyone gets caught. They don't answer how likely a crime is in Twickenham. The odds of a charge are the same in Twickenham as anywhere else the Met covers, and they are not good.
Twickenham's safety is middling. It is a little busier than its borough, mostly at the expense of parked cars and property, and comfortably ordinary for anyone walking home.