Sorry, Trump and Farage – London is no lawless ‘warzone’. Violent crime is lower than ever |
Last year, something extraordinary happened in London. As the conversation about crime got even louder, London quietly reached the lowest per capita homicide rate in its recorded history. Even London’s harshest critics have to accept this is impressive progress.
For too many, it will no doubt come as a surprise. In recent years, politicians and commentators have sought to spam our social media feeds with an endless stream of distortions and untruths – painting a dystopian picture of a lawless place where criminals run rampant.
Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump has inexplicably veered between describing London as a city moving towards sharia law, and a place with hospitals like “warzones” and areas where police don’t want to go. Here in Britain, Nigel Farage is dancing to his tune. Reform UK’s leader claimed last week that London was “in the grip of a crime wave”. Meanwhile, the party’s new candidate for mayor of London claimed that people pitied Londoners for living in a city that was “no longer safe”.
This latest startling statistic shows that those who talk down the capital at every opportunity couldn’t be more wrong: in London, the evidence is clear, we’re winning the battle against violent crime.
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