‘People don’t expect that the police will turn up’: Is London really an unsafe city?

If you don’t live in London or visit regularly, you may have found a couple of news stories in the last week confusing.

On the one hand, there was Mayor Sadiq Khan announcing that the city’s homicide rate last year was the lowest since records began – and the number of murders in 2025 was lower than any year since 2014.

But on the other, Reform’s candidate to replace Khan at the next mayoral elections, ex-Tory councillor Laila Cunningham, painted a very different picture of the capital last Thursday.

She told a press conference: ‘London, one of the greatest cities on earth, is no longer safe, and that didn’t happen by accident.’

A YouGov poll this week found that 61% of Brits thought London was unsafe with just 30% saying it’s safe – but those numbers were almost exactly switched for those actually in London, with 63% saying it is safe and 34% saying unsafe.

So, what’s really going on in our capital? Why do people outside London think it’s scary when Londoners and certain crime stats disagree?

Luckily, we had hundreds of Metro readers who were up for telling us what they think.

Crime-ridden streets or overhyped nonsense?

It’s fair to say that people probably tend to hold their phones a little tighter when walking down a street in central London, compared to elsewhere in the UK.

According to the Met’s own statistics, more than 117,000 phones were reported as being snatched in 2024 – and those are just the ones people flagged to the police.

Likewise shoplifting has spiked, with incidents increasing by a shocking 54% from 58,000 to 90,000 between 2023 and 2024 – considerably higher than the 15% increase across the rest of England in that time.

But while such examples might make you nervous about your wallet, they don’t necessarily mean you fear for your life when exploring the capital.

Andy Litchfield wrote: ‘People who live in London or visit regularly tend to think it feels safe. People who rarely or never go to London often have the impression that it is a crime-ridden no-go area. Strange.’

Nick Mick suggested there was a split between expectation and reality, writing: ‘A lot of people believe in Father Christmas and other similar things.

‘People’s opinions and reality are often miles apart.’

However, many other readers thought the crime statistics were selectively chosen to reflect well on the Met and Sir Sadiq.

Nickie Haynes said: ‘Safety is not measured by homicide alone. Safety from stabbing, mugging, theft and rape are also measures of safety.’

And Suzanne Kirk suggested that feeling unsafe can sometimes be just as constricting as being unsafe.

Asked why people don’t believe London is safe, she wrote: ‘Because it doesnt feel like it is.

‘I walked to my local park the other day and turned round when a bloke in a hoodie was coming towards me. Crime is still rife.

‘My neighbours had someone try to break in through their front door around midnight while they were still up. Most women sadly don’t feel safe.’

‘The idea that this is a terrifying jungle is appalling’

Bruce Houlder knows a thing or two about crime in London – after a decades-long career as one of the UK’s top criminal barristers, he started a new campaign simply titled Fighting Knife Crime London.

Much of the energy in the media and the public lately has been focused on ‘lesser offenses that affect people’s everyday life’, he said, rather than extremely serious crimes like murder.

Bruce continued: ‘When you’re talking about the perception of the average Londoner, I suppose my perception is much the same as everybody else’s – that we see a police force that’s been stripped out of its manpower who can’t cope with the level of minor offending that takes place.

‘People don’t expect that the police will turn up, even if they report what for them is quite a serious crime, and that leaves people feeling unsafe in their homes.’

Nevertheless, he considers the rhetoric from certain figures about London being a particularly unsafe city to be ‘just complete nonsense’.

He said: ‘The idea that this is a terrifying jungle which is not not a fit place to live is is appalling.

‘The ideas that some politicians are stoking here are positively damaging to the image that people from outside this country should have of our city, which is a very successful, a very vibrant, very diverse city.’

Even in his specialty area of knife crime, he said: ‘Other areas actually have a higher per capita rate of life, crime offending than we do in London.’

So what do the statistics say?

According to the Met’s figures released this week, there were 97 homicides in the capital in the year to January compared with 109 in 2024.

That represents an 11 per cent drop and a huge improvement on 2021 when a record 30 teenagers were among those the 133 killed.

There were only eight teenagers among the victims in 2025.

The murder rate now stands at 1.1 person per 100,000, the lowest since records began.

That is also below New York with a figure of 2.8 and Berlin 3.2. A thousand more arrests were made on average per month last year.

Sir Mark Rowley said he accepted London had a problem with mobile phone thefts but claimed police had ‘turned the corner’ on and were bringing figures down.

He told Nick Ferrari on LBC: ‘Phone theft is a big issue. We have turned the corner (on phone thefts). The footfall in the west End was up in December Londoners felt safe we are making progress.’

He said the latest figures shows a drop of a sixth non mobile phone thefts.

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