Yes, by the standards of anywhere with a market square. Recorded crime here runs about a fifth below the Somerset average. The city is dense by rural standards and empty by urban ones. Unemployment barely registers, and overcrowded housing is rarer still. Safety is not the argument you have to win about Wells.
Police recorded 1,254 crimes across the area in the twelve months to May 2026, which gives a published rate of about 76 crimes per thousand residents. That sits roughly 18% below the local-authority average. Both are published figures calculated on the same basis, which is worth saying, because dividing the crime count by the resident population produces a different and wrong answer: the rate uses statistical-area populations rather than the city's headcount.
For Somerset as a whole, the equivalent rate is about 93 per thousand. Wells at about 76 against a county at about 93 is a genuine gap rather than a rounding artefact, and it holds across a full year of reporting rather than one flattering quarter.
The texture behind those numbers is a compact and comfortably employed place. Across its neighbourhoods, population density averages about 3,080 people per square kilometre, which is town density wearing a city's title. Unemployment sits at about 2%, and about 1% of households are overcrowded. None of that causes the crime figures in either direction; it describes the kind of place that produces them.
On composition, violence and sexual offences account for about 39% of recorded crime here against about 35% nationally. Read that one carefully wherever you see it, because the category is a broad statutory grouping that takes in common assault without injury, and it is the largest single category almost everywhere in England and Wales. The real local outlier is shoplifting, at about 12% against about 8% nationally, with public order offences at about 10% against about 7%. Anti-social behaviour runs the other way, about 13% here against about 16% nationally. Criminal damage and arson at about 8% against about 7%, and other theft at about 5% against about 7%, are the national pattern with the serial numbers filed off.
What happens after a report is a force-level matter rather than a local one. Avon and Somerset Constabulary charges a suspect in about 11% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which places it 24th of the 42 forces in England and Wales. About 30% of cases close with nobody identified at all. That describes what the force does with a report, not how safe your street is, and blending the two gets you a worse answer to both questions.
Safety is one of the stronger arguments for living in Wells: the published rate sits well under the county's, the mix is unremarkable apart from the shops, and nothing in it reads like a city managing a reputation.