I always hear this but it seems to mostly be made up? Like yeah, there’s crime in London, but less than in most European or American cities… seems like a narrative that keeps being pushed without merit
It's a slightly mixed picture. Knife crime is one area that's been trending up for 10 years now. Shoplifting is at a 20 year high. Fraud is up. Firearms offences are roughly level.
But criminal damage is down. Of course, if you call the police for criminal damage, everyone knows they won't turn up and you'll just get a crime number, so unless you're claiming on insurance you're probably less and less likely to report it.
We shouldn't be aiming for London (with 200 phones stolen every day as it is) to reach the level of the worst European or American cities.
Assuming there are 9 million people in London, that means that 1/45,000 Londoners experience a phone theft on a given day.
We can then (very crudely) estimate the probability that a Londoner has their phone stolen over a ten year period:
1 - ((1-45000)/45000)^(365*10) = 0.08
So 200 phones a day translates to about a 8% chance of getting your phone stolen over a period of ten years.
I'm obviously not suggesting that the calculation above be taken too seriously. But it shows that 200 phones being stolen a day in a city of 9 million people is consistent with phone theft being a significant but not overwhelming problem.
(The adult population of London is around 7 million, and kids are obviously also victims of phone theft, so you won't get a radically different answer if you look at the population over a certain age.)
That number also doesn’t take into account the significant number of tourists that visit every year, which from what I can see amounts to around ~20 million people.
I live in London and I can tell you no, it isn't mostly made up.
The crime rates in other places is irrelevant if the city you've lived in for the last 20 years has become noticeably more dangerous.
This is not "a narrative that keeps being pushed without merit", in fact the people who dismiss such claims are often the ones who live very insulated lives.
It's also quite sad there isn't anyone with a big political voice connecting the dots between Brexit and the rise in crime.
Brexit has markedly made the UK's economy weaker, there are less opportunities, the opportunities that exist outside of finance/tech are quite low paid compared to other European countries while the cost of living in London is absurdly high when compared to other major European cities. It's the perfect storm coupled with high immigration: blame immigrants for the lack of opportunities caused by a policy pushed by anti-immigration rhetoric, it will just feed into giving power to Reform which, if given power, will continue to crash the UK's economical prospects.
The ship has sailed, it will take the UK quite a while to correct course, perhaps even a generation or so... While that correction course happens British society will just keep eroding away.
It is Brexit, but not how you think it. What Brexit did is basically reducing immigration from the culturally and societally compatible EU countries with the immigration from the ex colonies and other third world places.
I witnessed the aftermath of a murder last week in Stoke Newington! (Saw that the road had been closed off)
I've seen women publicly urinating into drains on a busy road (Hackney)
There are massive increases in the number of homeless people (Tooting, Clapton, Shadwell), several times I've seen a homeless looking person harass women passing by.
Seen needles lying around (Shadwell, Commercial Road)
The general advice now is never to wear a watch in Central London, this wasn't the case 10 years ago.
I've seen security guards restrain people trying to leave shops in Central London after they shoplifted.
So yeah, some areas might not look sketchy, and these gentrified places (e.g. Stoke Newington) might be ok if you stick to the bars, restaurants and then Uber home, but for a lot of people these remain dangerous if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I've literally spent hours walking around Shadwell and Commercial Road over the last couple of months, as well as places like Bow, Canning Town, Forest Gate, Romford that used to be awful. I've lived in Croydon most of the last 25 years.
I'm also not seeing any more homeless in London now than I used to see on Oxford Street when I lived by Marble Arch in 2000, for example. There were large encampments in the subways near Marble Arch at that time - I've not seen anything like it since.
> The general advice now is never to wear a watch in Central London, this wasn't the case 10 years ago.
Says who? I've never heard anyone say this, and don't know anyone who'd worry about wearing a watch in Central London.
"Says who?" Then we are living in separate universes because this is common knowledge.
Wearing a nice watch in Soho, Liverpool Street, Tower Bridge is super sketchy and you're likely to get comments about how 'brave' (stupid) you are. These are just the places I've been to, West London is meant to be much worse.
Again, never heard it. Never felt remotely unsafe. Don't know anyone who has had issues with it.
And can't find any actual data to corroborate that robberies have somehow reached such endemic levels.
EDIT: It gets comical to see that Met stats are now somehow trustworthy after the number of people here making a big deal of distrusting them. But notably the data shows the numbers to be small - in the hundreds per month - and having dropped significantly between 2018 and 2023. Furthermore, most of these crimes are burglary or theft, rather than crimes such as robberies or violence, so the chance of having them taken off your wrist is substanlly lower.
The article then covers an increase in "high-value" watch thefts from 2021 to 2022. Between 2021 and 2022 the numbers did in fact increase, and they were lower in 2021 than in 2023 as well. But we're talking 4885 watches total (not restricted to "high value") in 2021, of which about 1/3 are robberies. So you're much less likely to have your watch taken off you than e.g. your phone stolen.
Just past the edit window, so let me also add that the article points out a number of "high-value" watch thefts that suggests about a quarter of these thefts on a yearly basis would be "high-value".
If anything, these articles have made me feel more secure rather than less secure - these numbers are tiny given the size of London.
Sure, maybe don't go around flashing your watch if it's worth tens of thousands of pounds.
"Some 78,000 people had phones or bags snatched from them on the street in the year ending March 2024, according to the Crime Survey for England and Wales.
That is equivalent to 200 “snatch thefts” a day and is a 153 per cent increase on the number of incidents in the year ending March 2023.
London is seen as the “epicentre” of phone thefts with £50 million worth of handsets reported stolen in the capital in 2024.
In a blitz on the “scourge of mobile phone theft” in February, Met officers arrested 230 people in just a week and recovered 1,000 handsets by targeting hotspots such as Westminster and the West End."
> Phone snatching in Central London has become a significant issue, with the Metropolitan Police reporting around 80,000 phones stolen last year, primarily by organized criminal gangs. To combat this, police have increased visibility and implemented operations to deter theft, particularly in hotspot areas.
Yes, that's a lot. And yet per the Crime Survey, in London we are less likely to be a victim of crime than in the country as a whole, and crimes are at one of the lowest levels in decades based on interviewing people about whether they have been victims of crime, not police reports or press.
I would not care about the data. Just go out and see for yourself. Maybe you are lucky and you somehow manage to avoid these areas or you go there at the time when not much is happening, like early in the morning or whatever.
Additionally, being alert does not equal to living in fear.
A company is engaging in a marketing stunt for a problem that people perceive to be disproportionately high.
Do you think this tells us anything other than perception? Which several people have already pointed out we know are out of whack with actual survey of peoples actual experience with crime?
It's clear there are many phone thefts. It's also clear people believe the extent of crime is far higher than it is. It seems like a perfect thing for a company like Curry's to profit from.
Just a note that johnisgood appears to be another person on this thread who has very strong opinions about what it’s like to live in London based on online content that they’ve consumed, but who doesn’t actually live here:
And I consumed many people's "unsafe" experiences, similar to YOUR "safe" experiences.
As I said, N = ~4 saying "it's safe" means fuck all, just like N = ~4 saying the opposite.
So... you appear to be another person who invalidates and completely disregards other people's experiences (and your own Government's publishing) in favor of yours, because somehow yours is more valid. It is not.
You need to stop painting London as a safe place, because that it is not. Maybe it is on the routes you take in your car, but in general, no, not really. Hell, even Budapest is safer than London.
> Hungary's national crime rate in 2021 was approximately 0.77 crimes per 100 residents. This figure represents a significant decline from 0.82 in 2020, indicating a 5.86% decrease . Specific data for Budapest is limited, but the city's overall crime index is reported at 33.99 out of 100, which is considered low.[1]
> In contrast, London's crime rate is significantly higher. The annual crime rate in the London region is approximately 30.1 crimes per 1,000 people, which is about 86% of the national average for England and Wales . Violent crime constitutes 22.6% of all reported crimes in London . Notably, Westminster, a central borough in London, recorded a staggering 432.3 crimes per 1,000 residents, largely due to its high daytime population from tourism.[2]
So, by the available numbers, Budapest has about 0.77 crimes per 100 people, while London has 3.01 per 100. That makes London's crime rate ~3.9x higher, meaning Budapest is roughly 74% safer per capita.
There are safer cities than London and there are more dangerous ones. London is pretty middle of the pack, if you look at European or American cities of comparable size. Even the stats that you yourself link to show that London is one of the safer parts of the UK.
My claim was that London is not as safe as some people have stated so, mentions nothing about other parts of the UK. Do we know why there are so much knife crime in London? Do we know why is there so much crime in more dangerous cities? What are your guesses?
The rate of knife crime with injury, as recorded by the Met, has remained fairly stable since 2010. There has been a small but significant increase in overall knife-related offenses since 2010, but there is always the possibility that this has more to do with stricter enforcement than any baseline increase in criminal behavior. So knife crime is not really a good example of any kind of recent crime surge in London. See the first chart in this article:
(Note that the identification of Westminster as a knife-crime hotspot in the second chart is misleading, as this is an area of central London with lots of tourists and workers, thus inflating the number of crimes per the relatively small number of residents.)
Knife crime is a serious problem, but it’s not something that I worry about at all in my day to day life in London. It would be no more rational for me to do so (in fact, less rational) than it would be for a New Yorker to worry about being shot.
What I still don’t understand about this thread is why someone who doesn’t live in London has repeatedly being telling people who do live in London to “go out and see for themselves”. You seem very attached to a narrative about London found in certain sections of right wing online media, and unless you’re not telling us something, this can’t be because you have any personal interest in life in London. I feel like there’s some kind of agenda here, but I don’t care to speculate exactly what it is.
I presented government statistics and crime data from official sources and the discussion should be about whether those numbers are accurate and what they show, not about where I live or my motivations (I have no agenda).
People can reasonably interpret crime statistics differently based on their personal experiences and risk tolerance. Your experience feeling safe in London is valid, just as the experiences of those who feel unsafe are valid. The data I cited simply provides broader context beyond individual anecdotes.
Crime statistics are publicly available precisely so they can inform public discussion, regardless of who's discussing them. If you think the sources I cited are inaccurate or the comparison is flawed, I'm happy to discuss that.
This is consistent with my personal experience and that of others who've posted here. You have not posted any data indicating otherwise.
>the discussion should be about whether those numbers are accurate and what they show, not about where I live or my motivation
You must understand that if you dismissively tell people to "go out and see for yourself", and then it turns out that you don't even live in London, people are going to wonder how you ended up holding such strong opinions on crime in London.
> You have not posted any data indicating otherwise.
False. I have. See below.
> The Crime Survey data shows that crime in London, and the rest of the UK, has generally decreased over the past ten years
Your own source contradicts your claim.
The latest ONS "Crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2025" bulletin-the most recent data available shows headline crime rose to 9.4 million incidents, a 7% increase from the previous year (8.8 million). This is the opposite of the decrease you're claiming.
---
The crimes affecting daily safety have surged:
- Fraud: +31% (4.2 million incidents-highest since records began in 2017)
- Shoplifting: +20% (530,643 offences-highest since 2003)
- Theft from person: +15% (151,220 offences-also record highs)
---
You're conflating timeframes.
Yes, the 10-year trend shows overall decreases, but the ONS explicitly states there have been "increases across some crime types in the latest reporting period." The current trend shows London getting less safe, not more.
These aren't abstract statistics - fraud, shoplifting, and theft from the person are exactly the crimes that make London feel unsafe day-to-day. While homicides (-6%) fell slightly, that's a low-volume crime compared to millions of property offences hitting residents.
---
So... your own data source proves crime is rising in the categories that matter most for everyday safety.
---
PS. with regarding to:
> and then it turns out that you don't even live in London, people are going to wonder how you ended up holding such strong opinions on crime in London.
We have the internet. I can communicate with Londoners, visit regularly, read local London news sources, follow Metropolitan Police crime statistics, and so forth. The list is quite long.
By your logic, crime researchers, policy analysts, journalists, and statisticians could only study cities where they personally reside.
Your attempt to dismiss the data by questioning my location rather than addressing the statistics themselves suggests you're more interested in ad hominem attacks than substantive discussion.
The first part of your comment seems inconsistent. First you say that you have statistics to challenge my claim that crime in London has trended down overall in the past 10 years, but then you accept that "the 10-year trend shows overall decreases".
You'll find this note about the increase in 'headline crime' in 2025 vs 2024:
>the latest rise in CSEW headline crime was because of a 31% increase in fraud (to around 4.2 million incidents); this is the highest estimated number of incidents since fraud was first collected on the CSEW in YE March 2017
Surely you can't argue that fraud makes people feel unsafe when walking the streets. Fraud is a serious problem and the increase in fraud is concerning, but it's not a personal safety issue.
If you think about it, there are a lot of different categories of crime, numbers are bound to fluctuate, and so some of the categories will naturally show increases between one year and the next (just as others will show decreases). You can easily cherry pick one or two individual categories to paint whatever picture you want. I could equally point out that knife offenses, firearm offenses and robbery have gone down compared to 2024. Really, as many posters have pointed out, it makes more sense to look at longer-term trends rather than reading too much into year-on-year increases or decreases in specific crime categories.
The overall picture is that London is neither unusually safe nor unusually unsafe for a large European or American city. This has been the case for decades.
>I can communicate with Londoners
Well, can you? You're communicating with one now, but you seem quite determined to convince me not to believe either the official statistics or my own experiences.
> According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales 2024, an estimated 78,000 people had phones or bags snatched from them on the street in the year ending March 2024.[1]
> This is equivalent to 200 'snatch thefts' a day and is a 153% increase on the number of incidents in the year ending March 2023. London is regarded as the “epicentre” of phone thefts with £50 million worth of phones reported stolen in London in 2024.[1]
This is coming from your own Government, for crying out loud.
And 1-10 people saying "oh it's perfectly safe" does not mean anything. It is an actual issue, and you may not believe me until it happens to you, or someone you know, which is kind of typical, so I get it.
Look, they are not active all the time. 10 am in the morning on a Monday on a particular street, nothing might happen. It varies and I have no inside information.
If you look it up, you can see these snatching, it is recorded by CCTVs.
Looking at individual thefts is irrelevant. The aggregate data is what matters to my actual risk, and the actual data shows that the numbers are not significant.
The stats don’t show that it has become worse overall though. You have to cherry pick stats to make it look bad, which the media does because it generates outrage. Careful what you consume.
When we know that peoples perceptions of crime levels are entirely divorced from reality, perhaps you should spend less time watching Youtube, and more time looking at the actual stats.
Crime overall is at a low level historically in the England, per the Crime Survey of England and Wales, which track actual victims through surveys.
That's not to say the UK couldn't do much better, but this fearmongering is basically repeating far-right conspiracy claims pushed by the press that are not supported by data including by peoples actual responses when asked if they have actually been a victim as per the Crime Survey.
From The Guardian reporting on Crime Survey numbers for London relative to the rest:
"According the Crime Survey for England and Wales, someone is actually less likely to be a victim of crime in London than they are across the country as a whole. In the capital, 14.9% of people experienced a crime either to their person or their household in the year ending September 2023, compared with 15.7% nationally. But what about different types of crime?"
> When we know that peoples perceptions of crime levels are entirely divorced from reality, perhaps you should spend less time watching Youtube, and more time looking at the actual stats
When we know that police is understaffed and can't respond to all crime, perhaps you should spend less time blindly trusting the numbers. You, too, can't build an argument on unreliable data. Just like the poster you're replying to.
The numbers I'm referring to are from the Crime Survey for England and Wales which surveys people rather than rely on crime reports, so police staffing is entirely irrelevant to these numbers.
This was literally pointed out in the comment you replied to.
The issue is there, they were just there at a time where these people who are snatching weren't there. 18 phone snatching per day on one street, but not at all hours, and not on all streets. It varies. But yeah, we want people's experiences. Maybe some of these people on HN did not experience it. Perhaps they could ask their friends and the friends of their friends.
The Crime Survey carries out large-scale surveys of a sample of 75,000 households. It's not some dinky little opinion poll.
It's not going to be perfect, but it gives a very solid snapshot of peoples experience with crime without the massive distortion we know we get from looking at similar sized samples asked what they think crime levels are.
> The Crime Survey carries out large-scale surveys of a sample of 75,000 households. It's not some dinky little opinion poll.
So? Sample size only addresses sampling error, not nonsampling error, for nonsampling error its exactly as bad as the dinkiest little poll on the same topic (and for sampling error, it's not much better; polls are the sizes they typically are because it doesn't actually take a very large scale to be fairly reliable when you only consider sampling error, and, again, adding more size doesn't help at all against nonsampling error.)
Ok, so what nonsampling errors in the Crime Survey make it unreliable in your view? What would you suggest as an alternative source of information about crime levels in England and Wales?
When they are asked about their firsthand experience as victims of crime, they may still be untrustworthy but they're still going to be far more trustworthy than the alternatives.
No, that was just an example, for people not wanting to go out.
You are free to walk around these areas (just go to Knightsbridge) with an expensive watch to see if it is true or not. Get back to us safely to report.
Also... I literally just saw a cop walk past a lady overdosing as if all is fine, and did nothing to the woman who threw a bottle at the YouTuber. Who cares if it is on YouTube or not? I saw it regardless.
They aren't saying that crime doesn't exist, it's down compared to previously. You see how you and others can still experience crime even if it's down?
I'm guessing your solutions involve more police and anti immigration. While more social services and better prospects in life is what actually does something about the problem.
You’re acting like an old man who shakes fist at clouds, using their own anecdotal experiences over data in order to confirm your own pre conceived notions. Tale as old as time. What’s sad is you won’t recognise it.
> And I consumed many people's "unsafe" experiences, similar to YOUR "safe" experiences.
I am considering both sides here.
> As I said, N = ~4 saying "it's safe" means fuck all, just like N = ~4 saying the opposite.
This should alone should strengthen the claim that I am considering both sides, and it means jack shit.
> So... you appear to be another person who invalidates and completely disregards other people's experiences (and your own Government's publishing) in favor of yours, because somehow yours is more valid. It is not.
---
Next time please do it without any personal attacks, that does not favor your case (wait, do you actually have any?) that is already standing on weak legs. If you have no case apart from personal attacks, then yeah, I am in the wrong here, with regarding to you.
If you are not interested in actually doing your research, do not even bother, I am tired of the old story that "but muh experiences matter more!!11!". They DO NOT. Your experiences are not the universal truth, and it goes both ways.
I’m just honestly reporting my personal experience. Why would I want to deliberately go to a dangerous area that I have no reason to go to? Is that normal behavior for people who live in large cities?
I know that there is a lot of media reporting of knife crime and phone theft. However, I am contributing my personal experience to the thread. You could search YouTube for videos of people complaining about crime in any major city. This is a popular trope that gets a lot of views and engagement.
The point is that it happens not only in particularly shit areas of London, it happens in rich areas too, or where there are lots of tourists, areas that are supposed to be safe, but they are not.
And UK is doing fuck-all about it, they care more about who said what online. It is absurd.
As for your personal experience, sure, that is valid. It really depends on when you go out or what you are wearing.
I mean phone thefts can happen anywhere, but I imagine that’s also true of other places. If you’re a phone thief you’re going to go to the areas where people have nice phones, I assume.
What makes you so confident that you have a more accurate perception of life in London than its inhabitants? You were very confidently dismissive of my report of my own personal experience, so I was a little surprised to find out that you don't even live here!
Let this be a salutary warning to HN readers that a huge amount of baseless nonsense gets written about crime in London.
I wasn't dismissive at all. I'm just noting that maybe the common HN visitor, which is most likely an academic with the means to live in suburbia or nicer districts, may live in a bubble. I haven't written anything about crime in london.
Let this be a salutary warning to HN readers that people get needlessly pissy when you question them about the backgrounds of their experiences.
Potential energy vs kinetic energy. Just because it is not in motion doesn't mean the potential is not there, that's why everyone has Amazon Ring in front of their homes and won't let their kids alone in the park. Relying on police to deter crime or relying on police reports to understand the current crime landscape is beyond naive.
More importantly, you can't deal with potential crime by making real arrests, because then you have to start arresting people who haven't done anything.
Given we know from comparing e.g. Crime Survey data to polls about peoples beliefs about crimes that peoples beliefs about crime rates in the UK are not remotely well correlated with actual crime rates, that page doesn't tell us what you claim it does.
It tells us that out of visitors to Numbeo, people who claim to live in 3 British cities report that they are more worried than most others.
For Bradford, the data is based on just 131 contributors in the last 5 years:
Had to go to the 8th page of google to find something that agreed with your point did you? I couldn’t rebut it any better than the person below you, so bravo to them.
But we all know you’ll double down because you aren’t interested in any truth that goes against your narrative, prove me wrong.
That sounds a lot like the Swedish defense, that Malmö only looks bad because the reporting standards are more rigorous. Meanwhile there are literal hand grenades exploding on their streets daily.
Yes, the Crime Survey, which actually surveys representative samples about their direct experience as victims of crime.
With 131 biased samples over 5 years, to continue with Bradford, who are not asked about actual crime, but about how they feel about it without an qualification as to whether they have any actual experience with it, this site is not saying anything useful.
Presenting it as if it is ranking cities by actual crime rates is ignorant of the data gathering at best, and at worst blatantly dishonest.
Then again given the hyperbole you're employing regarding Malmö, I should perhaps not expect you to care much about the veracity of data - yes, attacks with explosives is an escalating problem in Sweden, but nowhere remotely at the scale you're claiming.
Well it's hyperbole alright, but a local measure helps not if it's not done the same way in all countries if you want to actually make a useful comparison.
Trying to find an international version leads me to ICVS and this[0] publication which likewise ranks London at the very top. By that data, the UK ranks average at per-capita crime but is second at the same people being victimized more than once, which I take points towards that the majority of the country is likely relatively normal, but a handful of cities have very concentrated crime rates that are raising statistics.
Do you have any other sources to show or do you just like pointing out that all of them are bad if they don't agree with you?
You conveniently left out that this ranking shows London top of 28 selected capital cities for a selection of 10 crimes in 2003/04, which we know from the Crime Survey for England and Wales was significantly closer to the UK all time peak.
You'll also note that the paper itself then provides data from additional capitals that it's conveniently not included in the main list. Several of those additional cities ranking above London. In other words, it's a sample that even the paper demonstrates isn't remotely comprehensive.
I don't need to provide any other sources - you're the one that made a claim that was based in "data" that was entirely worthless, and this new data still isn't even close to backing up the original claim.
