← More or Less
More or Less
Is crime in London ‘through the roof’?
00:08:58
How does violent crime in London compare to other global cities?
Loading summary
Transcript17 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello, and thanks for downloading the More Or Less podcast. We're the program that looks at the numbers in the news life and in the dingy alleyways of one of the most visited cities in Europe. And I'm Lizzie MacNeill. Throughout history, humans have managed to thrive in the most inhospitable environments, like Omyakon in Russia, where temperatures can get as low as -50 ° Centigrade. Or La Lincolnada in Peru, where hypoxia is a very real risk. And London, where today you have people being stabbed in the ass. Okay, so maybe we're being a little bit silly with that last one, but that is a very real quote from a very real source. The President of the United States, no less. In fact, the topic of how dangerous London is has been appearing rather a lot in a certain sphere of US politics, crime in London is through the roof. These claims are often seen as being part of the President's ongoing beef with London Mayor Sadiq Khan. But is it true? Is London truly a lawless hotbed of violent activity? To find out, I spoke to Matt Ashby, who's a professor at University College, London's Centre for Global City Policing. He's the lead for the Centre's report benchmarking crime in London against other global cities, looking at how London fares in serious crimes such as homicide, assault with injury and rape. Let's start with homicide, the intentional killing of another person.
- [01:28]
B
So the homicide rate in London in 2024 was about 1.2 per 100,000 residents. It's been between 1 and 2 per 100,000 residents for quite a few years now. It then dropped slightly further in 2025, but we don't yet have data for the other international cities to compare for 2025. And if you look at big cities in the rest of Europe, so Barcelona, Milan, Paris, then you'll see that London is pretty much middle of the pack.
- [01:58]
A
Of the European cities. In the study, Barcelona had the highest homicide rate with 3.8 per 100,000. The lowest was Milan, with 0.5 per 100,000.
- [02:08]
B
The rates in cities like Barcelona and Berlin are higher than in London, whereas in Rome and Milan they're slightly lower. But it's important not to put too much emphasis on what are relatively small differences, because even though we've done quite a lot of work to try to harmonize definitions of homicide across different countries and harmonize how we're defining the boundary of each city, for example, which actually can make a really big difference, it'll never be a perfect comparison. And so I think thinking of London as having quite typical rates of homicide for a large European city is probably more useful than comparing it to individual cities and individual years.
- [02:51]
A
Most of Asia and Australasia have slightly lower rates than that of Europe, going from 1.3 in Osaka to just 0.2 in Singapore. For homicide, North America is an outlier.
- [03:03]
B
If you compare London to Chicago and Los Angeles or New York or Toronto, then you'll see that the homicide rate in London is a lot lower. That's almost always the case when you compare the US to other countries, other developed countries, is that they have a very high homicide rate. In the us, the highest homicide rate of the cities we were able to look at was in Chicago. 2122 homicides per 100,000 people per year. So really substantially higher shootings make up
- [03:32]
A
the vast majority of all US homicides. In response to criticism of gun crime, US politicians often point to UK knife crime as being a comparable threat. Now, we have nowhere near the overall homicide rate of America, and it turns out we don't have the same homicide rate by stabbings either.
- [03:50]
B
So it's really hard to compare knife crime as a whole across different countries because it's typically not an administrative crime category. So an assault is an assault, whether it's with a knife or a crowbar or just with somebody's fists. But what we can do is compare knife homicide for some countries for a limited number of countries. And we can't do that at the city level, unfortunately, but we can do it at national level. And so we can see that in England and Wales, the homicide rate per 100,000 people again is about 0.4 per 100,000 per year are a victim of knife homicide. So if we do it by per million people, about four in every million people will be a victim of knife homicide in each year. That's slightly higher than in Australia, where it's about 3.6 per million, but it's lower than in Canada, where it's about double. It's about 8 per million people per year. And it's lower than in the US, where it's about 6.6 per million people per year.
- [04:49]
A
But what about other serious crimes like rape and assault with injury? Well, if you purely look at the numbers, then London doesn't come out. Well, according to the data, London has the highest rates of rape out of all the cities included in the report, with 97.3 per 100,000. So does that mean London has a serious problem with sexual offences? Not necessarily the definition of a rape
- [05:15]
B
in the UK is quite a bit wider than it is in some US states, for example, like New York, where they have different crime categories. We can do some work to harmonise those, but it'll never be perfect. The other big issue with using police recorded data is that some cities have put a lot of work in over the past 10 years or so to try to encourage victims to report when they've been a victim of sexual offending. And we can see that cities that have done that. So London has done that. Sydney in Australia has done that as well. Paris has done that. We can see that the, the number of recorded rapes in those cities has increased quite a lot over the past 10, 15 years. And in cities where that hasn't happened, the rates have stayed much more stable.
- [06:05]
A
Matt compares police recorded crime in England to the crime survey, which is an annual survey that asks people what crimes they've been victims of. Even if they did not report them to the police.
- [06:15]
B
We can see that the number of reported sex offences to the police has gone up and that's not been matched in the number of people who are telling the crime survey that that's gone up. So what that looks like then is that the number of offences is staying fairly similar, but the proportion of those offences that are reported to the police are, are going up. So if you look back to about 15 years ago, so about 2012, then you'll see that the rate of rape offending in London was lower than in, than in Chicago. It's then been climbing a lot in London and it stayed broadly the same in Chicago. Having looked at different explanations for that, we think the most likely explanation for that is that police are just recording more of those crimes now because more people are coming forward.
- [07:00]
A
The stats are not telling the whole story here. Another slightly muddy picture is assault with injury. Again, London seems to have much higher rates than other global cities, being second only to Berlin in Europe and New York in America. One of the reasons for this, Matt says, is that there might be fewer assaults with injuries in the US because they're allowed to carry guns. The other part is again due to the UK having a broader definition of what constitutes as an injury.
- [07:26]
B
There was something of a scandal about 20 years ago about police recording crimes as being less serious than the crimes that actually occurred. As a result of that, there's been a huge amount of focus from the police Inspectorate on making sure that police are recording crimes properly. What that means is that if you're the victim of a crime in London, it's more likely that that's going to be recorded as an assault with injury than in some other cities elsewhere. We are perhaps on one end of the spectrum in how serious an incident it has to to get recorded under this category.
- [08:00]
A
That means that a bruise or a black eye might be recorded as a sort of injury in London, but recorded as a lesser crime elsewhere. So what does Matt think about the narrative that London was once a completely safe city that's turned into a lawless and dangerous place?
- [08:16]
B
Yeah, the data tells us that narrative is complete rubbish. I was a police officer in London 20 years ago. It was a lot more violent than it is now. And we can see that in the homicide statistics. We can see that in the number of people who the crime survey that they've been a victim of crime. There is crime in London. Of course there is crime in London. There's crime in every big city. It would be great if there were less crime. But London is broadly similar to most other global cities in how safe it is from crime.
- [08:46]
A
Our thanks to Professor Matt Ashby and that is all we have time for this week. If you spot any spurious stats, please do write in to more or lessbc.co.uk until next week. Goodbye.