London has not fallen Trump and Musk couldn’t be more wrong

Let me tell you about my brush with London’s gangland scene. I was walking across to our car, early on a weekday morning, when one car, then another, careered down our leafy North London side street, way too fast. A few moments later, I heard a collision, and I thought, “well, that’s what happens when you drive at 40 in a 20 zone, you chumps”.

But then all hell broke loose. The first car suddenly reversed hard, slamming into the car behind; then two men in masks leapt out, opened the boot of the second car, and grabbed a pink suitcase out of it. Then, as the second car did a rapid three-pointer and zoomed off, the larger of the two men said to the smaller, in a northern accent that distinctly reminded me of Sean Bean — although there is no indication that he was involved — “you’ve done your job there, son”. Then they, too, hopped back in and sped toward the A406.

I bravely hid behind a van. Police told me later that it was probably a drugs heist of some kind. No one, as far as I know, has been arrested. It’s not exactly The Sopranos, but look, it happened.

The point is that I don’t want to sugarcoat London. Even in our pleasant and barely affordable Zone 3 suburb, lots of cars have been stolen from our street; there’s also a particularly odd mini-crime wave in which thieves smash car windows and steal the parcel shelves — those boards you put across your car boot — to flog for a few quid. And we’ve all had phones (and wallets, back when we used to carry them) lifted at some point.

But you might have heard worse. In particular, the US Right has decided that the UK in general, and London in particular, are completely screwed. This is not new: back in 2015, Donald Trump said there are “places in London and other places that are so radicalised the police are afraid for their own lives”. But it does seem to have picked up lately.

Let me tell you about my brush with London’s gangland scene. I was walking across to our car, early on a weekday morning, when one car, then another, careered down our leafy North London side street, way too fast. A few moments later, I heard a collision, and I thought, “well, that’s what happens when you drive at 40 in a 20 zone, you chumps”.

But then all hell broke loose. The first car suddenly reversed hard, slamming into the car behind; then two men in masks leapt out, opened the boot of the second car, and grabbed a pink suitcase out of it. Then, as the second car did a rapid three-pointer and zoomed off, the larger of the two men said to the smaller, in a northern accent that distinctly reminded me of Sean Bean — although there is no indication that he was involved — “you’ve done your job there, son”. Then they, too, hopped back in and sped toward the A406.

I bravely hid behind a van. Police told me later that it was probably a drugs heist of some kind. No one, as far as I know, has been arrested. It’s not exactly The Sopranos, but look, it happened.

The point is that I don’t want to sugarcoat London. Even in our pleasant and barely affordable Zone 3 suburb, lots of cars have been stolen from our street; there’s also a particularly odd mini-crime wave in which thieves smash car windows and steal the parcel shelves — those boards you put across your car boot — to flog for a few quid. And we’ve all had phones (and wallets, back when we used to carry them) lifted at some point.

But you might have heard worse. In particular, the US Right has decided that the UK in general, and London in particular, are completely screwed. This is not new: back in 2015, Donald Trump said there are “places in London and other places that are so radicalised the police are afraid for their own lives”. But it does seem to have picked up lately.

Trump, again, said in November that London had “no-go” zones. “Look at the crime you have in London,” he told GB News. “Today you have people being stabbed in the ass or worse.” The man certainly has a turn of phrase. His on-again, off-again buddy Elon Musk is similarly concerned about London: Police “allow” it to be “extremely dangerous”, he said in September, while they concentrate on “arresting comedians for social media posts”.

(To be clear, I do think it is bad that they arrest comedians for social media posts.)

There was, therefore, a certain amount of glee from the British Left when the latest London crime data came out, showing that in 2025, just 97 people were murdered in London — a rate of 1.1 per 100,000, the lowest since comparable records began in 1997.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley took the opportunity to say that London is “an extraordinarily safe global city”, safer than “every US state, or thereabouts, let alone the big cities”. So who’s right: Elon Musk and Donald Trump, or Sir Mark? Is London a hotbed of crime and violence — or not?

The short answer: Sir Mark. There is a longer answer, but let’s start with the shorter one.  If you want to not get stabbed to death, you’re better off in London than in almost any other big city in the West. There was huge excitement among the sort of person who finds this stuff exciting when London’s murder rate briefly spiked above that of New York City’s in 2018. But that excitement lasted for less than two months.

In general, the story is very much the opposite: over the period 2020-2023, there were 486 people murdered in London; there were 1,785 murders in New York. Even if you specifically don’t want to get “stabbed in the ass”, as Trump worried, you’re safer here. There were 378 stabbing/cutting murders in NYC to London’s 314, though the number involving the ass is less clear.

New York, of course, is itself far safer than it used to be. Its homicide rate peaked at something like 33 per 100,000 in the Nineties, and is now at a far more manageable 2.6. Among US cities, that’s very low; FBI data says Jackson, Mississippi, has a homicide rate of 77.8 per 100,000, and Detroit, St Louis, and other places also have high double digits. A randomly selected citizen of London is roughly 1/70th as likely as a randomly selected citizen of Jackson to be murdered.

Comparing with US cities is, of course, playing on easy mode — Americans love shooting each other almost as much as they love growing their GDP — but I don’t think London compares badly with Europe either. Brussels had a murder rate of 3.2 per 100,000 in 2023 (apparently there’s a problem with drug gangs there), while Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam all bounce around between one and two. I won’t look at Tokyo because I suspect the answer would make me sad, but as far as the Western Hemisphere goes, London seems to be a pretty good place to not get murdered. This may always have been at least sort of true: one academic study reckons 14th-century London probably saw about 20 murders per 100,000 people, which would put it on a par with modern-day Indianapolis, although it’s all a bit of a guess.

So that’s the short answer. If you want to avoid being murdered, London is pretty great, and while obviously there are more and less murder-y bits, you’re almost certainly better off here than in, say, a randomly chosen US city. More than that, you’re also safer now than you were at any other point this century.

But how about other forms of crime? That’s much harder, even just to know whether crime is going up or down at the city level. Murders are nice and easy: a dead body is a dead body; you don’t get much quibbling about it. But with other crimes, it’s more complicated. Between 2002 and 2019, for instance, sexual assaults recorded by police in the UK tripled. But in that time, police started paying attention to women much more, and women became much more willing to report sexual assaults because society became rightly less accepting of it. How do we tease those things out?

The usual way is using the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which literally just asks people if they’ve been a victim of crime in the last year. It found that over that period, the actual number of sexual assaults fell about 12%; the increase in reporting was entirely due to changing societal attitudes and police response. It was a good news story, not a bad one.

The trouble is, the CSEW isn’t fine-grained enough to tell us about London specifically, so we can’t be entirely sure. Still, police-recorded violent crime in London is dropping and has been for years, and that matches the CSEW’s findings across the country. Overall, then, I think that even if you’re worried about getting beaten up, London is getting safer. If we take the police’s numbers completely at face value, which we probably shouldn’t, it’s safer here than in the rest of the UK.

I don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish, though. Some things definitely have got worse. A friend of mine works for a US company in London, and he finds it mortifying that all his American colleagues come over here and immediately get their phones stolen out of their hands by masked men on electric scooters. The number of recorded phone thefts in London has shot up — in 2019, there were 91,481; last year, 117,211. Three quarters of all phones reported stolen in Britain were in London. Met Police data also shows shoplifting up since 2022, and I’m sure a lot of us have seen our local supermarkets placing the expensive stuff behind glass to stop it being lifted.

There’s a sort of stock response to people’s concerns about crime, of saying that, well, actually, we live in a historically safe time, and if people don’t realise it then that’s just the media or politicians fear-mongering. It is true, as I wrote in these pages many years ago, that there is an unfortunate disconnect between actual levels of risk and perceived levels of risk; it is difficult to improve people’s sense of safety by actually making things safer, though it is of course a start. And it is noteworthy that actually Londoners themselves broadly feel safe in their city, according to YouGov, while it’s outsiders — often behind a computer in San Francisco or troll farm in St Petersburg — who think of the city as dangerous.

But there are things that are undeniably going wrong. The tech and policy writer Martin Robbins noted recently that while crime numbers are down, the experience of crime, and especially of the police response to it, has changed, and not always for the better.

“In the year 2000,” he wrote, “if a thief stole my wallet and legged it, I’d understand the police struggling to do much about it and chalk it up to the idiot tax.” But nowadays, if someone nicks your phone, “I can track it via GPS and literally follow it from address to address, yet if I provide this gift of omniscience to the police they do absolutely nothing with it”. (The Times’ Tom Whipple noted in 2023 that the police refused to watch the CCTV that would have shown who stole one man’s bike, despite the fact that it would only have taken a few minutes.)

Sir Mark, the Met Office commissioner, agreed in a recent interview with The Telegraph that the police have failed to respond to modern challenges, such as the growth of shoplifting and phone-snatching, low-grade crimes which add a sort of patina of unpleasantness to the city — and limit its economic potential — even if they don’t cause physical injury. He says that it’s a priority to change that, and I hope it is, because, as Robbins says, it’s not of much interest to someone who’s been robbed that crime is at a historic low. “Should I also be grateful that I can travel from London to Watford without having my stagecoach routed by highwaymen?”

There are lots of things Americans can reasonably criticise Britain for: we can’t build anything, the weather is boring, our GDP growth is anaemic (although you really can’t blame London for that last one). And London has lots of problems itself, not least that you’ll struggle to buy a pint for less than £7 or a house for less than a million. But it’s not “extremely dangerous” and there aren’t really no-go zones. It’s expensive, annoying, and busy, but you almost certainly won’t get stabbed in the ass, unless you pay extra. To be honest, they’ve really cleaned Soho up these days.