Crime in Dorset

The safest and worst parts of Dorset

Districts and boroughs inside Dorset, by recorded crimes per 1,000 residents in the year to June 2026, shaded against the England and Wales average.

Neighbourhoods here are Middle Layer Super Output Areas of around 7,000 residents. Each figure is an average over the whole neighbourhood, and the ones holding a town centre run high wherever daily visitors outnumber residents. How the figures work explains why these areas are used rather than electoral wards.

By type of offence

Recorded offences in the 12 months to June 2026, with the change on the 12 months before.

Set against the national mix of offences, anti-social behaviour stands out in Dorset: it makes up about 63% more of recorded crime here than it does nationally. In the other direction, theft from the person, other crime, and drugs all make up well under their national share.

Home Office recorded crime, data.police.uk. Rates use ONS mid-2024 population estimates (798,914 residents). Categories are the Home Office crime types as published; they are not comparable with court or conviction figures.

What happened to those crimes

Police recorded 41,311 offences other than anti-social behaviour in Dorset in the year to June 2026. By the time this data was published, about 36% had been closed with no suspect identified and 36% closed because a prosecution was not possible or not pursued. Around 14% had led to a charge, caution or other formal action, and 14% were still open.

The widest shortfall against the national picture is for other crime: 11.3% of cases here ended in a charge or other formal action, against 16.9% across England and Wales.

Outcomes describe where each investigation stood when the data was published, so recent offences are naturally still open and the closed shares will edge up as cases conclude. Anti-social behaviour is left out entirely: police record no outcomes for it, and counting it would quietly flatter every percentage here. "Formal action" spans charges, summonses, cautions, penalty notices and community resolutions.

Outcomes by offence in Dorset

The share of cases ending in a charge, caution or other formal action, against the same figure for England and Wales. Offences with fewer than 30 recorded cases here are left out: a percentage of twelve cases moves several points on one decision.

"Charged or dealt with" counts every outcome that is a formal action: charged, summonsed, cautioned, penalty notice, community resolution. Anti-social behaviour is excluded from both columns because it carries no outcome by design. A low rate is not necessarily a failing of the force here: some offences are far harder to detect anywhere, which is why every row is shown against the national figure for the same offence rather than against the other rows.

Over time

Recorded crime in Dorset peaked at 82,269 offences in 2011; the latest 12 months, at 55,773, are about 32% below that peak. That works out at roughly 153 a day.

Download every month as CSV, including which months each force filed.

How safe does Dorset feel?

No aggregate yet: ratings are shown once at least five people have answered, because an average of two opinions is one household wearing a statistic.

Anonymous, one rating per person per area; rate again to change yours. The aggregate on this page refreshes within a day. Perception is not a crime figure and is never mixed into one, and it answers a question the recorded data cannot: how the place feels to the people reading this page.

Compared with nearby areas

Towns and districts in Dorset

• Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole
• Dorset

Against the rest of the country

In the national table, where 1st is the highest recorded crime rate, Dorset was 15th of 53 in December 2010 and is 47th of 53 today. It has moved 32 places away from the top: recorded crime here has fallen relative to the rest of the country.

Time of year

Recorded crime here peaks in July, about 32% above its quietest month, January.

Crime in context

How tightly packed it is

301 people per square kilometre, across 2,653 km². England and Wales averages about 400 people per square kilometre. Density is the usual explanation for a high position in the national crime table: a rate divides the crime of everyone who passes through by the number who sleep there.

What a home costs

The median home sold in Dorset in 2025 went for £342,000, across 12,109 sales, little changed on 2024.

The night-time economy

Dorset had 1,957 premises licensed to sell alcohol, 24.5 per 10,000 residents, against 35.9 per 10,000 across England and Wales on the same count. A concentration of licensed premises is the other half of why compact centres sit high in the national crime table: much recorded violence and public order happens where the night-time economy is, and it is counted against the people who live there rather than the people who go there.

Officers to record it

Dorset Police had 1,461 full-time equivalent officers as at 31 March 2026, 1.83 per 1,000 residents, below the England and Wales figure of 2.42. That is 20% above its low point of 1,217 in 2014. Recorded crime partly measures how much policing there is to record it, so a change in officer numbers moves the figures on this page even when nothing else does.

Licensed premises are as at 31 March 2022, the last count the Home Office published by licensing authority; it has reported national totals only since, and a pub estate changes slowly enough for the count to stay worth carrying. The date is shown so nobody reads it as current. Officer numbers are full-time equivalents from the Home Office police workforce return, counted across the whole force area. Nothing in this section causes anything on this page: a correlation is not a cause.

Stop and search

Dorset Police carried out 1,939 stop and searches in the 12 months to June 2026, 2.4 per 1,000 people in the force area. 28.1% ended in an arrest or another sanction, about the England and Wales rate of 28.3%. The rest found nothing.

Stop and search is recorded for the whole force area rather than by town, so it is set out in full on the Dorset Police page.

Every force compared, and how searches break down by the ethnicity officers recorded, is on stop and search by ethnicity.

When searches happen in Dorset

Of the 5,249 searches in Dorset that could be placed and timed from July 2023 to June 2026, the busiest hour was 3pm and the quietest 6am. 26% of them fell between 10pm and 4am, which is about the national share of 29%.

Dorset England and Wales, for comparison. Both drawn as each one's own share of its searches, so a small area and the country can be put side by side.

Counted on the hour the search happened, in local time. Only searches carrying coordinates can be placed, which is roughly seven in eight, so the number above is smaller than this area's true total and is a sample of it rather than a count. Three years are used rather than one because a single year of one area is too thin to show a shape. Forces filing a date with no time are excluded entirely. Stop and search by time of day sets out the national picture and the method.

Who oversees policing in Dorset

Policing in Dorset is overseen by the police and crime commissioner for Dorset Police. David Sidwick (Conservative) won that election in May 2024. Since that election, recorded crime here is down 10.5% (the latest 12 months of data against the 12 months up to the election).

Councils in England and Wales have no policing powers. The police force covering an area is answerable to a directly elected commissioner, or to the combined authority mayor where that office has taken the role on. The coloured strip under the trend chart shows these terms against the crime line.

The change column reports what recorded crime did across each term, because it is the first thing a reader wants from this table. It is what happened, not what the officeholder caused: recorded crime moves with reporting rules, how a force records what is reported, national policy and a pandemic, and those effects are far larger than anything one commissioner does in four years. The terms spanning 2020 and 2021 in particular contain the lockdowns, which cut recorded crime everywhere and handed the following term the rebound.

These are election results, not terms of office: commissioners resign, die and are disqualified mid-term, and by-elections between the scheduled polls are listed here only where one has been held. For who holds the office today, the force's own website is the authority. The last column compares recorded crime in the 12 months ending at the handover (or the latest data) with the 12 months ending at the election itself; where a monthly return is missing, the window slides by up to four months to the nearest complete one. A dash means the term ran under a year or no complete window exists near it.

Questions

Is Dorset safe?

In the year to June 2026, the recorded crime rate in Dorset was 69.8 per 1,000 residents. That is 23% lower than the England and Wales average. A recorded crime rate measures what the police recorded, across a whole county. It says nothing about any particular street, and areas with busy town centres, shopping areas or nightlife record more crime per resident because far more people are present than live there.

Is crime in Dorset going up or down?

In Dorset, the latest 12 months are 5.5% lower than the 12 before. Over the full series, recorded crime here peaked at 82,269 offences in 2011 and the current total is about 32% below it.

What is the most common crime in Dorset?

The most commonly recorded offence in Dorset is violence and sexual offences, with 18,483 offences in the 12 months to June 2026 (33% of all recorded crime). The next most common is anti-social behaviour, with 14,462.

Where does this come from?

Police recorded crime open data, published at data.police.uk by the Home Office under the Open Government Licence. It covers offences the police recorded, which is not the same as offences committed: crimes that are never reported never appear. Rates use ONS mid-2024 population estimates. How the figures work sets out the calculation, the reporting lag and every known gap.