6 ms·

> The focus of policing is also shifting. As street crime continues to fall, more attention is directed toward protest, dissent, and the perceived risk of unres

• fidotron 9mo ago
  Everyone in London knows what happens if you try to report "minor" street crime. Obviously everyone saying the UK isn't a utopia is a Russian bot, and we should be censoring them.
  • foldr 9mo ago
    Do you even go here?
    • fidotron 9mo ago
      > Do you even go here? Is that authentic vernacular?
  • widdershins 9mo ago
    Fine, but also how to explain the crazy claims flying around the internet that London is a warzone and a no-go area? I live here and... seriously, nothing has changed. I feel perfectly safe and always have. Yeah sure, there's some phone theft, it's not great. This phone theft wave is just a symptom of everyone carrying £500 devices around. Big cities have always had theft, pickpocket and snatching crimes. But it's nothing astonishingly new or different. I know one person who had their phone snatched, never seen it happen myself. So how to explain this massive wave of social media posts making out that London's unsafe? There is definitely a narrative being pushed, whether by Russian bots or not, I cannot say.
    • fidotron 9mo ago
      Because everyone that experiences the crime stops tolerating it and leaves. This is why the area around the greenbelt so closely resembles the inner cities of 20 years before. This isn't some new phenomenon - Lee Kuan Yew famously described the newspaper purchasing arrangement at Piccadilly Circus in the 1950s, which was incomprehensible by the 1980s. I'm old enough to remember when they had posters telling people not to wear iPod white earphones because that will get you mugged (and it would) - pure blaming the victim nonsense. If London defenders were half as enthusiastic about cleaning up their city as they are about attacking anyone pointing out the all too obvious problems they genuinely would be in utopia.
      • skippyboxedhero 9mo ago
        I lived in South London a few decades ago, it was the exact same situation. Lived in central London, close to 100% of the crime was happening from one area. Police refused to go into that area because of "community relations". No crime in areas that didn't abut this location but no desire to fix. Police pretend to police. Moved to South London, crime more prevalent but, again, certain areas are worse. Police won't go to these areas, "community relations" even worse. Cash machine near housing estate treated like lootbox. Next election comes round, candidate spends most of their time canvassing on estate. Police only go onto the estate to attend events with "community" telling them they are bigots. Crime continues. Everyone who works this out either leaves or, if they get enough money, move to safe areas of West London. Today's Londoners do not realise everyone has left, it is just a bunch of people who moved there in the last ten years telling everyone how brilliant it is and pretending they have lived there for years before being forced to leave too. Property prices suggest that actual long-term citizens are continuing to leave in large numbers.
        • fidotron 9mo ago
          > Everyone who works this out either leaves or, if they get enough money, move to safe areas of West London. Today's Londoners do not realise everyone has left, it is just a bunch of people who moved there in the last ten years telling everyone how brilliant it is and pretending they have lived there for years before being forced to leave too. Property prices suggest that actual long-term citizens are continuing to leave in large numbers. Painfully accurate. The fact even Lily Allen, of all people, made a music video about delusional Londoners telling themselves it's all fine, when it's not, speaks volumes, and they're still at it. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmYT79tPvLg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmYT79tPvLg )
  • youngtaff 9mo ago
    "Everyone knows" says someone who now lives in Montreal!
    • fidotron 9mo ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46602802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46602802 I do appreciate your efforts at digging.
• pjc50 9mo ago
  Anecdote is not data. It is both true that the police absolutely suck at handling petty crime, and the Met have a fairly terrible reputation; and that more serious violent crime is much, much less of a problem in London than it used to be (and less than US cities, of course).
  • throwaway85825 9mo ago
    [flagged]
  • azangru 9mo ago
    Sure; but the article's premise is that street crime is falling (and as a result, the police, which, presumably, has more free time on their hands, can focus on other things). Assuming petty crime is street crime, and seeing that you agree that the police suck at it, is the article's premise correct?
    • foldr 9mo ago
      Yes, it’s correct. Violent crime in London and the UK more generally has been on a long term downward trend. This is not incompatible with there being spikes in some specific categories of crime. But it’s consistent with the trends for homicide, for which the statistics are pretty hard to dispute, and where London has fewer per capita than Berlin, Brussels and Paris (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jan/12/london-homicide-rate-drops-to-lowest-in-more-than-a-decade https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jan/12/london-homic...). You’re posting an article by someone with eccentric views on a lot of topics and an anti-multiculturalist agenda to advance. (For example, they believe that Rishi Sunak is not English.)
      • mike_hearn 9mo ago
        Stats can almost always be disputed unfortunately. One reason homicides are down is because hospitals have got better at keeping stabbing victims alive. Stripped of context it looks like a win. Put in context the question becomes, why are there so many stabbing victims? Gang crime, etc.
• teh64 9mo ago
  The man who says Rishi Sunak is not English [0] might be lying? Thats crazy. [0] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/society/2025/02/of-course-rishi-sunak-is-english https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/society/2025/02/of-cou...
  • RansomStark 9mo ago
    I guess it depends on what you mean by English. England is a country, but you can't have an English passport, you can only get a UK passport. so, English is a kinda-sorta a non-nationality, but it is very much an ethnic group. I don't think anyone is claiming that Rishi Sunak isn't a UK citizen, but he certainly isn't a member of the English ethnic group, or any of the Celtic ethnic groups that also make up the UK's native population.
    • foldr 9mo ago
      The usual meaning of English. Say, roughly the criteria that would make someone eligible to play for the England football team. Skin color has nothing to do with it, and I can assure you that very few English people either know or care whether they have any ‘Celtic’ ancestry. No-one questions the Englishness of white men born in England to two non-English parents. People raising the absurd non-issue of Rishi Sunak’s Englishness are just concealing their rather obvious prejudices with a lot of bafflegab about ‘English ethnicity’ (a concept which not even they can really take at all seriously, if they at least have some acquaintance with English history).
      • 9JollyOtter 9mo ago
        There are Ethnic groups in England that have been present for several thousand years. Some people clearly mean this and can't articulate it better. Rushi Sunak ancestry is obviously Indian. I don't really care about his ethnicity (he another politician in a suit to me), but I can understand what people mean when they say he isn't English without automatically assuming they are Racist.
      • RansomStark 9mo ago
• zpeti 9mo ago
  You know how the NHS reduced waiting lists a few years back? If you had waiting lists of say 100 for a surgery, they basically said - the list is maximum 15 people, after that it's whoever books first who gets the surgery. So basically you had to be lucky and be the number 15 on the list once a spot was open. But! Magically NHS waiting lists got shorter! The government could say this on Question Time on the BBC, woohoo! I imagine this is the kind of thing that's happening now with petty crime reports.
  • foldr 9mo ago
    Claims about certain categories of crime rising or falling in England are usually based on the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which is not based on police reports, but on surveying a random sample of people to see if they have been self-reported victims of various kinds of crime.
• tialaramex 9mo ago
  One of the really boring things about crime stats is that if you insist that "Nobody will do anything" and so you don't bother to report crimes, the crime stats go down -- because you didn't report a crime. It suits a certain kind of person to have this obvious statistical fact portrayed as some sort of failing of existing institutions. Because it's just how statistics work it won't magically change if you're dumb enough to put them in charge but they can certainly tell gullible people like you that they've fixed it. Reporting crimes is one of those tedious things citizens have to do to get a nice society to live in, like patiently queueing for things, or putting trash in the bin. You could choose not to do it, but don't blame anybody else if no-one does it and now your society sucks.
  • tdeck 9mo ago
    While this sounds true, it's also true that police often will try to bully you into abandoning a crime report or treat you with contempt of they don't consider the crime "worthwhle". So not only do you not get a resolution, as expected, but you get to waste your time and be treated poorly. All that to increment a couter that might in aggregate reach a number that might get noticed by someone that might result in a policy that might 5 years later start to address the problem but may also just be used to crack down on everyone's rights as part of a right wing fear campaign? It's nowhere near as clear cut as waiting in line or picking up litter.
    • tialaramex 9mo ago
      So, fun fact, I actually reported a crime last week. A few days later I got a "Caller ID blocked" call and was like "Scammers?" but I'm the kind of person who at least answers the call to say "Fuck off" if they're scammers and it wasn't a scam it was some nice lady whose job is to sift this endless pile of crime reports. She didn't treat me with contempt, though of course she's not going to magically make the crime not have happened, or - given I wasn't sure who did it - even commit to having somebody actually do anything about it. But hey, that's statistics for you. I disagree that somehow picking up litter is different. You're not going to magically make there not be any litter are you? No. But nevertheless in aggregate it has an effect.
• zingar 9mo ago
  The people who gathered stats professionally are correct. I’m twitchy about this because I’m hearing from relatives in far more dangerous countries and cities about how London is under siege from immigrant criminals and sharia law is being imposed in the streets. Their news bubble is full of current articles that use as “evidence” pictures of riots from a decade ago where the violence was not committed by immigrants. This would be laughable if not for how completely these folks have swallowed this nonsense. It’s at best unscrupulous journalists desperate for eyeballs but given how pervasive this is it feels naive to assume anything but a paid, coordinated campaign. “Are you ok in the UK?” Yes, I’m right here in London. London is fine.
• ChrisRR 9mo ago
  A single data point does not show a trend