Yes, and not marginally. Recorded crime here runs well under the Dorset average, in a town where most people own the house they sleep in and the median resident stopped going out at midnight some years ago. The largest category above the national norm is nuisance rather than violence. Nobody is pretending this is a crime-free town, because no town is. It is, though, one where the safety question mostly answers itself and then apologises for taking up your time.
Over the twelve months to May 2026, police.uk recorded 523 crimes across Verwood, a published rate of about 37 per thousand residents. That sits clearly below the figure for Dorset as a whole. Both numbers are published rates calculated against statistical-area populations rather than something you can reconstruct by dividing the crime count by the number of people who live here, so they are worth taking as given rather than checking with a calculator.
The concrete version: about 37 recorded crimes per thousand residents in Verwood, against roughly 55 per thousand across the Dorset local authority area over the same twelve months. That is the whole comparison, without the usual softening.
The kind of place producing those numbers is exactly what the housing suggests. Population density averages around 3,060 people per square kilometre across the town's neighbourhoods, which is suburban rather than urban. Unemployment sits at roughly 2% and overcrowded households at about 1%. None of that causes anything on its own, and treating low unemployment as a crime prevention strategy is the sort of reasoning that gets written into council documents and believed by nobody who has read one. It is simply the texture: a settled, low-churn, comfortable town, and the recorded crime figures read like it.
On what the 523 offences actually consist of, spread across 14 categories, violence and sexual offences make up about 34%, which is essentially the same as the England and Wales share of roughly 35%. That category is a broad statutory grouping covering everything from serious assault down to common assault without injury, and it is the largest category in almost every area of the country, so a third of the total here means Verwood looks like everywhere else rather than anything worse. Anti-social behaviour is the genuine outlier, at about 27% locally against roughly 16% nationally. Shoplifting accounts for about 8% against a national 8%, criminal damage and arson about 8% against 7%, other theft around 5% against 7%, and public order roughly 5% against 7%. Read as a set, the mix is a national profile with the nuisance dial turned up.
What happens after somebody calls it in is a separate question, and it is answered force-wide rather than street by street. Dorset Police charged a suspect in about 14% of cases over the twelve months to May 2026, against roughly 12% nationally, which places the force twelfth of the 42 forces in England and Wales. The less comfortable figure is that around 35% of cases were closed with no suspect identified at all. That is not a measure of how safe Verwood is, and it should not be blended with the crime rate; it answers the different and more irritating question of whether anyone gets caught.
Safety is the thing Verwood does best. If the deciding factor in your move is whether you can walk home without thinking about it, stop reading here, because this page has nothing else to tell you on the subject.