Comment by azangru
2 days ago
> The focus of policing is also shifting. As street crime continues to fall, more attention is directed toward protest, dissent, and the perceived risk of unrest.
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...
Anecdote is not data. It is both true that the police absolutely suck at handling petty crime, and the Met have a fairly terrible reputation; and that more serious violent crime is much, much less of a problem in London than it used to be (and less than US cities, of course).
> Anecdote is not data.
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.
That’s why we have the national crime survey, performed by the ONS.
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.
pretty hard to underreport homicide
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So far, I have never seen any article or even comment online explain explicitly why this is the case.
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).
I don’t understand why ONS should be expected to do anything but gather numbers. If good policing is the cause or reduction in alcohol consumption is the cause who cares?
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”.
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from https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/world/europe/london-polic...
There was a phone theft wave that peaked in 2024. It’s still happening, but it’s significantly less of a problem now - some stats say 30% down from the peak by mid 2025. I had my phone stolen in 2024, I know others who did, but I haven’t heard of anyone having theirs stolen recently and people aren’t really worrying about it any more.
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.
Something that does upset me is that only the monetary value of a phone is ultimately considered in sentencing but these days a phone is a lot more, it is a lifeline to the rest of the world often having your ability to pay and travel built in. A theft of a phone can make a bad day very long and very difficult.
Sure; but the article's premise is that street crime is falling (and as a result, the police, which, presumably, has more free time on their hands, can focus on other things). Assuming petty crime is street crime, and seeing that you agree that the police suck at it, is the article's premise correct?
Yes, it’s correct. Violent crime in London and the UK more generally has been on a long term downward trend. This is not incompatible with there being spikes in some specific categories of crime. But it’s consistent with the trends for homicide, for which the statistics are pretty hard to dispute, and where London has fewer per capita than Berlin, Brussels and Paris (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jan/12/london-homic...).
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.)
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Similar story in Canada. Violent crime and serious crime is on a clear downward trend. Yet in most majour cities you a less safe, and the public transit system is more dangerous than ever.
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.
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Rape rates in the UK have more than tripled over the past two decades, why doesn't that count as serious violent crime? https://www.statista.com/statistics/283100/recorded-rape-off...
From the link - This is possibly due to better reporting practices by the police as well as an increasing willingness of victims to come forward, including historic victims of sexual violence.
Not definitive, but certainly a possible explanation.
You know how the NHS reduced waiting lists a few years back? If you had waiting lists of say 100 for a surgery, they basically said - the list is maximum 15 people, after that it's whoever books first who gets the surgery. So basically you had to be lucky and be the number 15 on the list once a spot was open.
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.
Claims about certain categories of crime rising or falling in England are usually based on the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which is not based on police reports, but on surveying a random sample of people to see if they have been self-reported victims of various kinds of crime.
The people who gathered stats professionally are correct.
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 of the really boring things about crime stats is that if you insist that "Nobody will do anything" and so you don't bother to report crimes, the crime stats go down -- because you didn't report a crime.
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.
While this sounds true, it's also true that police often will try to bully you into abandoning a crime report or treat you with contempt of they don't consider the crime "worthwhle". So not only do you not get a resolution, as expected, but you get to waste your time and be treated poorly. All that to increment a couter that might in aggregate reach a number that might get noticed by someone that might result in a policy that might 5 years later start to address the problem but may also just be used to crack down on everyone's rights as part of a right wing fear campaign? It's nowhere near as clear cut as waiting in line or picking up litter.
So, fun fact, I actually reported a crime last week.
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.
A single data point does not show a trend
The man who says Rishi Sunak is not English [0] might be lying? Thats crazy.
[0] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/society/2025/02/of-cou...
I guess it depends on what you mean by English. England is a country, but you can't have an English passport, you can only get a UK passport. so, English is a kinda-sorta a non-nationality, but it is very much an ethnic group.
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.
If we go by the explanation from wikipedia [0], Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage would not be considered English, as their families are not part of the English or Celtic ethnic groups. Their ancestors are Turkish and German who came to the UK after 1850. Do you believe they are not English? I mean even the current King of the UK would not be considered English by your definition! He is descended from Greek, Danish and German people [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_monarchy_of_the...
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The usual meaning of English. Say, roughly the criteria that would make someone eligible to play for the England football team. Skin color has nothing to do with it, and I can assure you that very few English people either know or care whether they have any ‘Celtic’ ancestry.
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).
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Everyone in London knows what happens if you try to report "minor" street crime.
Obviously everyone saying the UK isn't a utopia is a Russian bot, and we should be censoring them.
Fine, but also how to explain the crazy claims flying around the internet that London is a warzone and a no-go area? I live here and... seriously, nothing has changed. I feel perfectly safe and always have.
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.
Because everyone that experiences the crime stops tolerating it and leaves. This is why the area around the greenbelt so closely resembles the inner cities of 20 years before. This isn't some new phenomenon - Lee Kuan Yew famously described the newspaper purchasing arrangement at Piccadilly Circus in the 1950s, which was incomprehensible by the 1980s.
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.
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"Everyone knows" says someone who now lives in Montreal!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46602802
I do appreciate your efforts at digging.
Do you even go here?
> Do you even go here?
Is that authentic vernacular?