Wheatley is about as safe as the rest of South Oxfordshire, which is to say safe. Its crime rate is a whisker above the district's. The gap amounts to a few incidents. Unemployment is tiny and nobody is packed in. A village this size records so little crime that one busy month can move its standing.
Police.uk records put Wheatley's crime rate at about 51 per 1,000 residents in the year to May 2026, roughly 3% above the South Oxfordshire average. That rate covers 276 recorded crimes over the twelve months, a total small enough that a few incidents either way would erase the difference.
Set side by side, the two rates are about 51 per 1,000 for Wheatley and about 49 per 1,000 for South Oxfordshire as a whole. Two crimes per thousand residents over a year is the whole of the gap. Anyone who reads "above average" and pictures something worse is reacting to the label.
The village itself is a low-pressure place. Average population density across its neighbourhood areas is about 2,600 people per square kilometre, unemployment was 2% at the 2021 Census and overcrowding about 2%. Those figures describe a settled, comfortably housed village. They do not explain the crime figure, and nothing in them should be read as a cause of it.
By type, violence and sexual offences made up 34% of Wheatley's recorded crime in the year to May 2026, against 35% across England and Wales, so the biggest category is level with the national share. It is a broad legal grouping that includes common assault without injury, which is why it tops the list almost everywhere. Shoplifting was 12% against 8% nationally, anti-social behaviour 12% against 16%, other theft 10% against 7%, criminal damage and arson 10% against 7%, and public order offences 6% against 7%. With only 276 crimes in total, a handful of incidents moves any of those shares by several points, so this is one year's mix and nothing more permanent. The shoplifting share is the oddity. A village with a modest row of shops is still enough for the people who treat them as a free sample.
The police side is a separate question. Thames Valley Police, the force covering Wheatley, charges a suspect in about 9% of cases, against about 12% nationally, putting it 37th of 42 forces in the year to May 2026. About 37% of its cases closed with no suspect identified. Those are force-wide figures covering a large patch of the Thames Valley, and they tell you how likely a report is to end in a charge, which says nothing about how likely you are to need to make one. For a view of the road you are buying on, the street-level crime map on police.uk shows where incidents were logged month by month, though with totals this small, a single bad week can light up one corner.
Wheatley is an average place for crime by South Oxfordshire's standards: in line with the district, low in absolute terms, and with no sign of being a problem. If something does happen, the force that picks up the phone is slower to charge than most.