For years, London has been portrayed by Khan’s critics as a city in terminal decline, undone by liberal governance, diversity and supposed softness on crime. The hard evidence now points in the opposite direction.
News broke this week that London’s murder rate has fallen to its lowest level in more than a decade. According to the Metropolitan Police, 97 homicides were recorded in the capital in 2025, down from 153 in 2019 and 109 in 2024. Both the police and the mayor say the figures place London among the safest major cities in the western world.
Perhaps most striking is the collapse in youth homicides. Killings of under-25s have fallen from a peak of 69 in 2017 to 18 in 2025.
This decline has happened despite London’s population growing, from around 8.1 million in 2010 to roughly 9.1 million today. Met figures show the capital recorded around 1.1 homicides per 100,000 residents in 2025. That compares with 3.2 in Berlin, 2.9 in Brussels and 1.6 in Paris. London is also markedly safer than major North American cities. New York’s homicide rate stands at 2.8, Los Angeles at 5.6, Houston at 10.5 and Philadelphia at 12.3 per 100,000 residents.
These figures landed just weeks after Donald Trump claimed crime in London was “crazy” and suggested police were afraid to patrol parts of the city, comments Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley dismissed as “complete nonsense.”
A combination of more targeted policing, a sustained focus on early intervention and youth diversion has driven the change, according to police and the mayor. Sadiq Khan says the “public health” approach to violence is delivering results.
“The evidence shows that violent crime rates are proportionately lower in London than in any other UK city,” he said.
You might reasonably expect this positive news to dominate the national conversation. Yet while outlets such as the BBC, the Guardian and the Evening Standard reported the figures, much of the right-wing media put a negative spin on it.
The Telegraph led with the headline: “Sadiq Khan claims London is getting safer. These charts prove him wrong.” The article bundled together unrelated offences, from shoplifting and dangerous driving to sexual offences, in an apparent attempt to drown out the fact that far fewer Londoners are being murdered.
The piece also quoted Laila Cunningham, Reform UK’s newly announced London mayoral candidate, calling for a “tougher approach” to knife possession, while reminding readers that Khan, a long-standing target of Donald Trump, had dared to say that “many people have been trying to talk London down.”
The Daily Mail took a different tack, framing the statistics as evidence that Scotland Yard was “reigniting” a feud with Trump.
GB News, meanwhile, couldn’t resist inserting criticism from Conservative London Assembly member Susan Hall, who warned against relying on “selective statistics” and pivoted quickly to concerns about violence against women and girls.
For years, London has been portrayed by Khan’s critics as a city in terminal decline, undone by liberal governance, diversity and supposed softness on crime. The hard evidence now points in the opposite direction. And for sections of the press invested in that narrative, acknowledging that success appears to be a step they can’t bring themselves to take. Which is not to say that in a world in which resources for the public sector have been eroded for a generation by taxation and fiscal policies emanating from the political right, public servants like Sir Rowley do not face tough choices. He has chosen to prioritise preventing life-destroying crime, something, I’m sure, Londoners will endorse.
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