Does street crime in fact continue to fall? I keep hearing about bicycles getting stolen, or how in London, mobile phones get snatched. It was also common to hear how police fails to prosecute various kinds of crime (usually mentioned in contrast to how they do prosecute noncrime crimes such as 'hate speech').
Here, for comparison, is a paragraph from an essay by Konstantin Kisin:
> A month earlier, I was walking through a posh part of London when I saw a young man in a balaclava snatch a bag from a tourist. When I told people about what I saw at various meetings, most people were surprised that I was surprised. Phone thefts, muggings and all kinds of petty crime are now considered normal and routine.
Which story is correct?
[0] -https://www.konstantinkisin.com/p/theres-good-news-for-brita...
Obviously everyone saying the UK isn't a utopia is a Russian bot, and we should be censoring them.
[0] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/society/2025/02/of-cou...
This is a situation where the data may not be capturing the reality, though.
An increasingly common tactic for decreasing crime statistics is to reduce reporting of crimes. The more difficult you make it to report a crime, the better the crime numbers look.
In one city I’m familiar with, it became so well known that reporting small crimes was a futile endeavor that people just gave up. It was common knowledge that you don’t bother calling the police unless it was a major crime. Not surprisingly, the crime statistics started to look better.
You’re posting an article by someone with eccentric views on a lot of topics and an anti-multiculturalist agenda to advance. (For example, they believe that Rishi Sunak is not English.)
But! Magically NHS waiting lists got shorter! The government could say this on Question Time on the BBC, woohoo!
I imagine this is the kind of thing that's happening now with petty crime reports.
Not definitive, but certainly a possible explanation.
It suits a certain kind of person to have this obvious statistical fact portrayed as some sort of failing of existing institutions. Because it's just how statistics work it won't magically change if you're dumb enough to put them in charge but they can certainly tell gullible people like you that they've fixed it.
Reporting crimes is one of those tedious things citizens have to do to get a nice society to live in, like patiently queueing for things, or putting trash in the bin. You could choose not to do it, but don't blame anybody else if no-one does it and now your society sucks.
Yeah sure, there's some phone theft, it's not great. This phone theft wave is just a symptom of everyone carrying £500 devices around. Big cities have always had theft, pickpocket and snatching crimes. But it's nothing astonishingly new or different. I know one person who had their phone snatched, never seen it happen myself.
So how to explain this massive wave of social media posts making out that London's unsafe? There is definitely a narrative being pushed, whether by Russian bots or not, I cannot say.
I don't think anyone is claiming that Rishi Sunak isn't a UK citizen, but he certainly isn't a member of the English ethnic group, or any of the Celtic ethnic groups that also make up the UK's native population.
I'm old enough to remember when they had posters telling people not to wear iPod white earphones because that will get you mugged (and it would) - pure blaming the victim nonsense.
If London defenders were half as enthusiastic about cleaning up their city as they are about attacking anyone pointing out the all too obvious problems they genuinely would be in utopia.
No-one questions the Englishness of white men born in England to two non-English parents. People raising the absurd non-issue of Rishi Sunak’s Englishness are just concealing their rather obvious prejudices with a lot of bafflegab about ‘English ethnicity’ (a concept which not even they can really take at all seriously, if they at least have some acquaintance with English history).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_monarchy_of_the...
A record 80,000 phones were stolen in the city last year [inferred to be 2024], according to the police, giving London an undesirable reputation as a European capital for the crime.
Overall crime in London has fallen in recent years, but phone theft is disproportionately high, representing about 70 percent of thefts last year. And it has risen sharply: The 80,000 phone thefts last year were a stark increase from the 64,000 in 2023, the police told a parliamentary committee in June.
That is partly because this crime is both “very lucrative” and “lower risk” than car theft or drug dealing, Cmdr. Andrew Featherstone, the police officer leading the effort to tackle phone theft, told a news conference. Thieves can make up to £300 (about $400) per device — more than triple the national minimum wage for a day’s work.
And they know they are unlikely to be caught. Police data shows about 106,000 phones were reported stolen in London from March 2024 to February 2025. Only 495 people were charged or were given a police caution, meaning they admitted to an offense.Almost everyone can see quite visibly that crime is not decreasing but then you have people with a clear political and financial motive saying: the stats, you are just a loon or (even worse) someone who might not be from London.
If you read the best source on this, hospital admissions, you will see that ~95% of the drop in "violent crime" is due to decreases in alcohol consumption. That is it. Ex this impact and in relative terms, violent crime in cities has been increasing significantly. And violent crime is supposed to be the rare subset of crime when, obviously, other categories of crime are generally increasing.
Btw, the group that publishes this data is also (strangely) unwilling to make this known and, afaik, do not include this information in press releases.
The other factor is that the composition of London's population has naturally changed over the last ten years. As London has continued to dominate economically, the poor have been emptied out from certain areas contributing greatly to a reduction in crime stats (and, unfortunately, an increase elsewhere in the country). For example, Camden has seen a huge reduction in violent crime, is this a surprise? If you look at areas that have stayed the same, crime has got worse (again, in relative terms/ex the above factors, crime in the UK is falling in many areas and rising in others).
I will say this another way: data is not collected fairly or accurately. There are massive political and financial incentives against accurate data. In London, this has always been the case because it is not possible to win elections in some areas in London with high crime if you admit that crime is high in those areas...you have to blame society. Twenty years ago, you had the same thing: city has never been safer, politicians doing so well, Met doing so well...once you have seen this a few times, you should start to wonder whether it is true...particularly as the current line is that crime was rampant twenty years ago...when it obviously wasn't. Anecdotes will always tend to represent the reality better than data which is produced for political purposes (and I think people know this, the stats exist in part so that people can hop online and say that everyone is doing a great job, you see the same thing online with central government...it is very weird).
Not sure about the UK, at least in Canada it's poverty/people being broke. More homeless people and the general harassment they inflict on people in their surrounding area, more petty crime that the police don't bother investigating so people don't bother reporting it. More theft from grocery stores, more petty scams for <$1000 &c.
A few days later I got a "Caller ID blocked" call and was like "Scammers?" but I'm the kind of person who at least answers the call to say "Fuck off" if they're scammers and it wasn't a scam it was some nice lady whose job is to sift this endless pile of crime reports.
She didn't treat me with contempt, though of course she's not going to magically make the crime not have happened, or - given I wasn't sure who did it - even commit to having somebody actually do anything about it. But hey, that's statistics for you.
I disagree that somehow picking up litter is different. You're not going to magically make there not be any litter are you? No. But nevertheless in aggregate it has an effect.
Lived in central London, close to 100% of the crime was happening from one area. Police refused to go into that area because of "community relations". No crime in areas that didn't abut this location but no desire to fix. Police pretend to police.
Moved to South London, crime more prevalent but, again, certain areas are worse. Police won't go to these areas, "community relations" even worse. Cash machine near housing estate treated like lootbox. Next election comes round, candidate spends most of their time canvassing on estate. Police only go onto the estate to attend events with "community" telling them they are bigots. Crime continues.
Everyone who works this out either leaves or, if they get enough money, move to safe areas of West London. Today's Londoners do not realise everyone has left, it is just a bunch of people who moved there in the last ten years telling everyone how brilliant it is and pretending they have lived there for years before being forced to leave too. Property prices suggest that actual long-term citizens are continuing to leave in large numbers.
Correlating it with police stats and murder stats suggests that reporting and recording is actually going up as a proportion of crime. Petty crime like shoplifting has gone up, but relatively speaking most people would probably take that over stabbing and murder even if ideally we’d have neither.
There’s this weird trend that’s taken over social media trying to portray London as a lawless hell hole but few people who actually live here are experiencing it that way, and the stats back that up. It’s largely people outside London that are claiming the crime is bad here.
Rushi Sunak ancestry is obviously Indian. I don't really care about his ethnicity (he another politician in a suit to me), but I can understand what people mean when they say he isn't English without automatically assuming they are Racist.
Turns out it wasn’t just random street crime. It was being run by organised crime networks, and it went down significantly after they managed to disrupt a few major rings.
These waves do happen from time to time when criminal networks discover a new tactic, before the police figure out an effective method to deal with it. It was youth stabbings a few years ago and acid attacks before that, both are much reduced now.
Those criminals will move onto something else now, undoubtedly. Perhaps shoplifting, which it’s now reported is being also increasingly run by gangs. Point is, you can’t necessarily look at an individual type of crime as an indicator of criminality as a whole, could just be exploiting an opportunity.
My girlfriend walks to/from the train station daily in the early morning and late night without any trouble and personal safety isn’t even something we spend any time thinking about. Obviously crime happens, but against other comparable large cities it’s only really Tokyo and a few cities in semi-authoritarian countries that seem that much safer to me. Big European cities are about the same and US cities are much worse.
Beyond reporting anything I see, which I do, I’m not sure what kind of cleaning up you expect me to do? Obviously it’s a factor in how I vote, but it’s not even a top 3 issue to be honest.
Painfully accurate.
The fact even Lily Allen, of all people, made a music video about delusional Londoners telling themselves it's all fine, when it's not, speaks volumes, and they're still at it. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmYT79tPvLg )
You understand this is the kind of thing those of us that lived there have heard a million times?
It's exactly what people say before the thing that happens that makes them leave.
> US cities are much worse.
This also is not the case, and it's amazing how propagandized the UK has to be to think it. If you lot were aware of the true standard of life in most of the US you'd riot.
(i) people who live in London, or
(ii) people who left London because they were victims of a crime.
I'm genuinely sorry that you were the victim of a crime, but people in group (ii) are obviously likely to have a negative perception of London regardless of how much or how little crime London actually has.
By way of analogy, consider that there are people who experienced a traumatic air accident and who have never flown again. I don't blame them. But their experiences don't countervail the statistics showing that flying is safe.
>> US cities are much worse.
> This also is not the case, and it's amazing how propagandized the UK has to be to think it. If you lot were aware of the true standard of life in most of the US you'd riot.
I've lived in London and DC, and DC (at the time at least, 2007-2011) was uncontroversially much more dangerous than London. And of course it's only 6 months ago that the President of the USA declared a public safety emergency in DC ;) You're not wrong about the overall standard or living, but you are wrong about crime and safety.
I visit the US often and have been a victim of crime there more often than anywhere in Europe. That’s not to say I don’t love the US. San Diego is probably my favourite city in the world. But apart from one or two exceptions, large US cities suffer from far worse crime than anywhere in the UK. I got mugged at gunpoint by a crackhead in Philly. Quality of life can be fantastic of course. My aunt lives in a gated community in LA and drives to work so she never has to interact with the real world, so to speak, and her QoL is amazing. But large parts of the city are absolutely dystopian.
Try walking from Fashion District to Chinatown and tell me where you’d find something like that anywhere in London, let alone Z1. I don't even know if I've seen anything that bad in actual third world cities.
England hasn't had an English king since 1066, that's not controversial, and even then the inbreeding between the European royal houses was creating a pan-european elite that made world world 1 more of a really bad family argument than anything else.
What's really odd is that Rishi Sunak is extremely proud of his ethnicity and heritage, it's unfortunate that we've made it almost impossible for other people's to have that same pride.
Denying the existence of an ethic group is extremely racist, and is often considered a precursor to other much more serious issues.
If you have any acquaintance with English history you would be well aware that there are native ethnic groups that have been in the UK since approximately the end of the younger dryas around 11,000 years ago.
The last major migration was the anglo-saxons around 1500 years ago.
These groups still exist and the majority of the UK population can still trace their origin back to one of these groups.
And you'd be aware that nothing even vaguely corresponding to 'England' existed 11,000 years ago. If you are willing to lump the descendants of Romans, Normans, Jutes, Durotriges, Iceni, Vikings, etc. together into one group and call them all 'English' just because they happened to live in the territory of what is now England, then you've already conceded the point that the identity is national, not ethnic.
But hey, over in the other thread you are denying that Boris Johnson is English, so it's clear that you have a rather eccentric concept of the category.
The English ethnic group is defined by a shared genetics and culture, the English enthic group isn't just political it is biological and can be identified via DNA.
I wouldn't consider my definition eccentric, it's based on the UN defintion: Ethnic group or ethnicity refers to a group of people whose members claim a common heritage or common ancestry and usually speak a common language and may have some common cultural practices.
The other thread argued that Boris Johnson is ethnically Turkic (I have no idea if that is true) on the assumption it is true, Boris Johnson may meet the requirement of a common language, but does not meet the requirement of a shared ancestry to be ethnically English.
Many of the groups that you mentioned existed in the UK over 1000 years ago, and shared in the same invasions, same issues, and developed a shared culture due to that shared history and closeness of relations, and of course as evidenced by DNA analysis interbreeding.
So yeah I would say that in the space of a millennium multiple groups can become one group.
I also
Also, on looking for incentives the very obvious incentive to try discredit these orgs is so that politicians outside London can blame crime on immigration in the city that has the most immigrants.
This is straight out of the playbook of groups who want to manipulate public opinion so that they can get away with something that is not in the interests of the electorate.
Look at the US where these capabilities have been under siege since the start of this presidency, for example NASA’s climate data and the EPA’s air quality health impact measurement. Or more directly relevant: “immigrants are eating dogs and cats” and it doesn’t matter that the people who track crime professionally say “no they aren’t”.
I’m twitchy about this because I’m hearing from relatives in far more dangerous countries and cities about how London is under siege from immigrant criminals and sharia law is being imposed in the streets. Their news bubble is full of current articles that use as “evidence” pictures of riots from a decade ago where the violence was not committed by immigrants.
This would be laughable if not for how completely these folks have swallowed this nonsense.
It’s at best unscrupulous journalists desperate for eyeballs but given how pervasive this is it feels naive to assume anything but a paid, coordinated campaign.
“Are you ok in the UK?” Yes, I’m right here in London. London is fine.
One reason homicides are down is because hospitals have got better at keeping stabbing victims alive. Stripped of context it looks like a win. Put in context the question becomes, why are there so many stabbing victims? Gang crime, etc.
The reason why the difference is important is because it implies extremely different strategies to fixing it...obviously.
"politicians outside London"...ah, ofc, the Londoner conspiracy theory. It is wrong to blame immigrants for crime but correct to blame people outside London? The reason why people think there is a link between crime and immigration is because there is a link between crime and immigration. I am not sure what else can be said. You are implying that public opinion should be manipulated to hide this fact (even though this is already something the government does) whilst complaining about other people manipulating public opinion. Classic.
- I admit that I don't know much about ONS but its name suggests that they are not about research/speculation/anecdata into how we got where we are or how to fix it, they are just there to collect data - I would count the reduction in alcohol consumption as an extremely positive step for fixing problems; societal problems like crime need holistic solutions. What the correct solution is seems orthogonal to my point which is that stats orgs work hard to produce rigorous data and it is dangerous to undermine them in favour of groups (bloggers?) who have no such standards applied to their work
> It is wrong to blame immigrants for crime but correct to blame people outside London
I'm not sure what point you're making, I'm not blaming crime on people outside London. I imagine that the small amount of crime in London is committed by people in and around London. I expect the tiny minority of immigrants to be responsible for a tiny minority of those crimes.
> there is a link between crime and immigration
I'd be interested to read stats from a reputable source that applies the sort of rigour that the non-political civil servants who typically gather stats.
> You are implying that public opinion should be manipulated to hide this fact
I am stating that the fact of low crime rates in London should not be undermined in favour of conspiracy theories that are used to demonise the civil service.
Even if there is a link between crime and immigration the low rate makes it far less of a problem than the other societal problems we face, like the quick political points scored by demonising and hollowing out the civil service.
> even though this is already something the government does
This government already bows to this immigration nonsense. They are not a good example in your case.
Also, hospitals have got better at treating knife injuries in lots of places, not just London. This would not explain why London has a low homicide rate per capita compared to lots of other cities.