Worthing is about as safe as the average south-coast town, which is safer than the tabloid version and busier than the parish-magazine version. The published crime rate lands at roughly ninety-eight incidents per thousand residents per year. The borough figure is about ninety-nine, essentially the same number viewed from the same angle. The 12-month volume comes in at 11,216 recorded incidents to March 2026. The middle of the map, which is where most towns actually sit if anyone bothered to check.
The published rate for Worthing is about ninety-eight incidents per thousand residents per year, and it sits within a percentage point of the local-authority average of ninety-nine. Both figures are published rates, which use a slightly different statistical population than the census resident count, so the rate is what it is. Anyone tempted to divide the 11,216 recorded incidents by the resident population and check the arithmetic will get a slightly different number, and the reason is technical rather than suspicious.
A town-level rate of about a hundred incidents per thousand is roughly what most seaside towns of Worthing's size record. That is not the seaside making people commit crimes. It is the mix of daytime footfall, evening economy, and dense residential streets that produces the numerator. A village of the same population with no through-visitors and no pubs would record fewer incidents. A busier town would record more. Worthing sits at the coastal-town average, and the coastal-town average is where it should sit.
The town has been through worse. The Battle of South Street in October 1934 saw violent confrontations between protestors and Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists in the town centre, an event that would not fit inside a modern safety definition at all. Half a century earlier, the arrival of the Salvation Army in the 1880s prompted large-scale riots involving a group called the Skeleton Army, running intermittently for years. Neither is remembered by anyone currently living. Both mean the bar for "a safe town" in Worthing has moved considerably in a hundred and forty years, which puts today's rate in useful perspective.
A town-level crime figure does not tell a buyer whether a specific street is fine. Crime concentrates around the town centre and the night-time strips in most towns of this shape, and thins out through the residential streets away from the pubs. A buyer serious about safety should look up the specific postcode on the published crime map, ideally at the small-area level, before deciding anything. The town average will make an anxious buyer relax about the wrong postcode and worry about the right one, which is the failure mode of headline figures generally.
Verdict: average, three out of five on the summary rating. Which for a coastal town of this shape, on the south coast, running a night-time economy and a full retail centre, is the honest answer. The published rate says what it says. The specific postcode says what it says. Both are worth reading before signing anything.