Crime / Why London feels lawless |
Mark Rowley, the head of the Metropolitan Police, has been discussing London’s crime rates. Rowley it seems, is eager to talk about London’s homicide rate – which fell last year. During one interview he told listeners that he ‘is about facts and evidence cos I’m a copper’, before going on to provide some highly selective statistics to support his claim that ‘London is getting safer’.
Rowley shared what he clearly felt was a reassuring fact, that ‘well over 80 per cent of Londoners feel safe in London’. It did strike me that a city in which a fifth of the inhabitants don’t feel safe might have some issues with crime and policing, but the Met Commissioner seemed very satisfied with this figure.
The problem for Rowley is that the homicide rate is a poor indicator of how safe Londoners feel. While it is true that London’s homicide rate did fall last year, and that there are more murders in other cities around the world, thankfully almost no one is killed in the capital in the 21st century. There were 97 homicides last year, compared to 109 in 2024 and 153 in 2019. Of course, every such killing is a tragedy, but really they don’t happen anywhere near often enough for the typical Londoner or visitor to spend time worrying about whether they’ll be murdered in the city.
What people worry far more about is crimes which they are likely to be victims of. There were 837,826 ‘victim based’ crimes