london
AP
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London’s murder rate will fall to its lowest level in decades in 2025, officials said Monday. Mayor Sadiq Khan said the figures disproved claims spread by US President Donald Trump and others on the political right that crime was out of control in the British capital.
Police recorded 97 murders in London in 2025, down from 109 in 2024 and the lowest number since 2014. According to the Metropolitan Police, the number of murders per capita is the lowest since comparable records began in 1997, at 1.1 murders per 100,000 people.
This compares to 1.6 per 100,000 people in Paris, 2.8 per 100,000 in New York and 3.2 per 100,000 in Berlin.
“Some politicians and commentators paint an image of a dystopian London and spam social media endlessly with distortions and falsehoods,” Khan told The Associated Press. “And nothing could be further from the truth.”
Trump, who has spent a decade insulting Khan, said in September that crime in the city was “through the roof.” He called Mr Khan a “ruthless loser”, a “mean person” and, in front of the United Nations General Assembly in September, a “terrible, terrible mayor”. Trump also baselessly claimed that Khan was trying to bring sharia (Islamic law) to London.
City officials say a combination of targeted crackdowns on organized crime and a violence reduction unit aimed at deterring youth involvement in gangs are contributing to the decline in violent crime.
Declining rates of murder and other violent crimes are only part of London’s crime picture. Many Londoners have experienced phone snatching first-hand or witnessed the sharp increase in shoplifting recorded by the Office for National Statistics.
“I feel like petty crime has increased,” said Vijay Pankania, walking his dog along the River Thames outside London’s City Hall. “Things like stealing cell phones from people, I’ve seen it here many times.”
The Crime Survey for England and Wales, which asked people about their criminal experience rather than relying on police figures, found that while overall crime rose by 7% in the year to March 2025 compared to the previous 12 months, it was still significantly lower than in 2017.
Claims that London is a crime-ridden dystopia under Labor Mayor Khan have proliferated on social media sites including Elon Musk-owned
“There are certain politicians and certain commentators who are using London as a punching bag to suit their own political ends,” Khan said in an interview with The Associated Press.
“London is, in my opinion, the greatest city in the world. We are liberal, progressive, diverse and incredibly successful,” he said.
Mr Khan said London was a world center for tourism, sport and culture, with “more international students than any other city in the world and record amounts of foreign direct investment”.
“Last year, more Americans came to London to study, work and invest than since records began,” he said, calling London the “antithesis” of everything that politicians like President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance represent, who have expressed the belief that Europe is being overwhelmed by immigrants.
Mr Khan described such views as “nonsense”, but expressed concern that people unfamiliar with London “whose only source of information is their social media feeds… may mistakenly believe that this dystopian vision of London is real”.
Mark J. Hill, a lecturer in cultural calculus at King’s College London, who has studied the rise in social media posts about violence in London, said there was evidence that online discourse shapes offline behavior.
“Posts asking if it’s safe to visit London could be bots, but they’re just as likely to be real people worried about coming to London,” Hill says. “These stories are influencing their decisions about where to go on vacation…In my opinion, this is one of the really problematic things about this issue.”
“There is currently no silver bullet for making people aware of what is statistically true and what is misinformation or misinterpretation of reality,” he said.
