Westbury is exactly as safe as the county it sits in, which is a duller answer than either camp wants. The recorded crime rate lands within a whisker of the Wiltshire average. Not the quiet exception, not the local problem. People who tell you a small Wiltshire market town is basically crime-free have not looked, and people who tell you it has gone downhill have not looked either. The numbers are ordinary, and ordinary is what most buyers are actually asking about.
Police recorded 1,197 crimes across the town in the year to May 2026, which works out at a published rate of about 62 per thousand residents. That is the figure as published on its own statistical-area population base rather than something worked out from the town's headcount, and the two are not interchangeable. It covers everything reported and recorded, from the incident that made someone's year worse to the incident nobody noticed until the insurance claim.
Set that against Wiltshire as a whole and you get 62 per thousand for the town against roughly 62 per thousand for the authority, a difference of about one percent in the town's favour. That is not a meaningful gap in either direction. Anyone marketing Westbury as safer than its surroundings is reading a rounding error as a selling point.
The texture behind those numbers is unremarkable in the way that usually matters. Population density across the town's neighbourhoods averages around 4,270 people per square kilometre, which is town density rather than city density. Unemployment sits at about 2%. Overcrowded households run to about 2%. None of that causes anything on its own, but it describes the kind of place producing the figures: a working town where most people are housed adequately and in work.
On what the crimes actually are, violence and sexual offences account for about 44% of recorded crime here against about 35% nationally. That category needs reading properly rather than reacting to, because it is a broad statutory grouping that includes common assault without injury, and it is the largest single category almost everywhere in England and Wales. Anti-social behaviour makes up about 18% locally against about 16% nationally, which is close to level. Criminal damage and arson runs to about 12% against about 7% nationally. Public order sits at about 6% locally against about 7% nationally, and burglary at about 4% both locally and nationally, which is as close to identical as these things get.
What happens after a report is a different question from how much crime there is, and the two should never be run together. Wiltshire Police charges a suspect in about 10% of cases, against about 12% nationally, and the force ranks 32nd of the 42 forces in England and Wales on that measure. About 34% of cases are closed with no suspect identified at all. Those are force-wide decisions covering the whole county rather than anything about this town specifically, and they answer the question buyers rarely ask out loud, which is whether anyone will actually be caught. The honest answer, here as in most of the country, is usually not.
Safety in Westbury is middling in the most literal sense: it sits on the county line and does not move off it. That makes it a poor reason to buy here and an equally poor reason not to.