Yes, and unremarkably so. Recorded crime here runs a shade under the county's own rate. Not dramatically under it. Not above it. A place where the crime number is boring is a place doing something right, and this one is boring.
Police recorded 1,421 crimes across the Wareham area in the twelve months to May 2026, and the published rate works out at about 52 offences per 1,000 residents, roughly 4% below the Dorset average. Both are published figures rather than anything assembled here. They also rest on different population bases, which is why the count and the rate should never be reverse-engineered into each other by anyone at a kitchen table with a calculator.
The comparison in full is about 52 per 1,000 here against about 55 per 1,000 across Dorset as a whole. That is a difference you would be doing well to notice while walking around.
The surrounding texture is quiet in the same direction. Population density averages roughly 1,500 people per square kilometre across the area's statistical neighbourhoods, unemployment sits at about 2%, and about 2% of households are overcrowded. None of those figures causes anything on its own, and plenty of low-density, low-unemployment places record considerably more crime than this. They are worth knowing chiefly because a property brochure will mention them in the same breath as safety and hope you draw the line yourself.
On composition, over the same twelve months, violence and sexual offences account for about 34% of recorded crime here against roughly 35% across England and Wales. That is as close to identical as these comparisons get, and the category is a broad statutory grouping that takes in common assault without injury, so the headline share always sounds worse than the reality it describes. Criminal damage and arson matches the national share at about 7%, and public order sits at about 6% against 7%. The real departure is anti-social behaviour, at about 28% here against roughly 16% nationally, with shoplifting running the other way at about 5% against 8%. Anti-social behaviour is also the category most sensitive to what people bother to report, which makes a high share partly a measure of local tolerance rather than purely of local behaviour.
What happens after a report is a separate question with a separate answer. Dorset Police charges a suspect in about 14% of cases, against roughly 12% nationally, which places the force twelfth out of 42 across the twelve months to May 2026. That is a force-wide charging figure covering the whole of Dorset rather than a signal about these streets, and it should not be folded in with the crime rate to produce a single impression of safety. The number worth sitting with is the other one: about 35% of cases close with nobody identified. Twelfth of 42 is a statement about other police forces, not a promise about anything of yours that goes missing.
Safety here is middling in the comfortable sense rather than the worrying one: slightly under the county rate, a mix that tracks the national pattern almost everywhere it matters, and one outlying category that says as much about reporting as about conduct. Nobody moves here for the crime statistics, and nobody with any sense stays away because of them.