Wadebridge is safe, and marginally busier than the county it sits in. Around 80 recorded crimes per 1,000 residents a year. Cornwall as a whole runs at about 74. Not a hotspot, not a sanctuary, just a town that does the shopping, drinking and banking for a district many times its own size and then gets handed the district's numbers.
The police recorded 645 crimes in the area in the year to May 2026, which works out as a published rate of roughly 80 per 1,000 residents. Against the Cornwall average of about 74 per 1,000 over the same period, that puts Wadebridge around 7% above its own local authority. Seven percent is not a warning. It is the gap between a town with a high street and the villages that use it.
The texture behind those numbers is ordinary. Population density across the area's small statistical areas averages about 2,890 people per square kilometre, which sounds urban until you remember that the built-up part of Wadebridge is compact and the fields start almost immediately. Unemployment sits at about 2% and overcrowded households at about 1%. None of those things causes crime, and the point of quoting them is the opposite: this is not an area carrying the pressures that usually sit behind a raised crime rate. It is a market town with a busy centre and a lot of people passing through it.
The category split is where a reader can easily frighten themselves. Violence and sexual offences account for 48% of recorded crime here against about 35% nationally, and that number needs its caveat stated rather than buried: it is a broad statutory grouping that includes common assault where nobody is injured, and it is the largest category almost everywhere in England and Wales. Criminal damage and arson run at 12% against about 7% nationally. On the other side of the ledger, anti-social behaviour makes up 11% here against about 16% nationally, and shoplifting 5% against about 8%. Other theft, at 8%, and public order, at 6%, both sit close to the national shares of about 7%.
Then there is the question nobody asks the estate agent. Devon and Cornwall Police charged a suspect in about 8% of cases over the same twelve months, against about 12% nationally, which ranks the force 42nd out of the 42 in England and Wales on that measure. Around 26% of cases were closed with no suspect identified at all. That is a force-wide figure covering an enormous rural area rather than anything specific to Wadebridge, and it says nothing about how likely you are to be a victim here. It says quite a lot about what happens next if you are.
Safety here is unremarkable in the useful sense of the word. Wadebridge sits close enough to its county average that the number should not move a decision either way, and anyone choosing between this town and its neighbours will find the crime figures the least interesting page in the file.