There has been a sweeping wave of violent crime taking place in London as the Tabloids tell us, people are being stabbed every single day and robbed nearly every week as per mainstream media. However checking some statistics according to the met police crime statistics, I found the truth somewhat different (or somewhat true, depending on which politics you side with).
According to the crime and data statistics there has been an decrease of 6528 of burglary incidents in London from 26,104 (16-17) to 19,576 (17-18). However this figures related to burglary incidents related to businesses and community, for residential it has risen by 14,626 as it was 43,424 last year and it rose to 58,050.
To support this claim the number of robberies in relation to personal property compared to business property has also gone up, if you look at the image below:
In general violent crime has increased!
To further support this claim, Alexa Bradley from ONS told The Independent, that the there was a "genuine increase of violence", she supported her claim by stating that knife crime had an increase of nearly "22%" and a "11%" increase in firearm violence. She also said "We have also seen evidence that increases in some types of theft have continued, in particular vehicle-related theft and burglary." which confirms the above data by met police.
Among other crimes, another type which saw an increase was rape and sexual offences which were "increasing by 31 per cent to more than 50,000 offences", a worrying figure.
But this raises a question, how do we solve this so called "crisis"?
Increase government funding to youth programmes on staying away from gang life and knife crime, because a major contributor which makes people turn to that life is the level of austerity present in London and how the lower class are treated because of lack of wealth than the upper class. There aren't as many privileges available to those not living in Kensington, or Canary Wharf or any other posh areas in London.
We have a government that is fully committed to Brexit, rather than spending some efforts in managing the country and if they do they mess up the economy. NHS cuts, police cuts are not the way to fill the tax gap which in 15/16 was a staggering £1.5 billion and compared 13/14 of £1.1 billion.
Instead we need to find a way to increase our revenue, either increase tourism revenue because it sucks or increase corporation on big businesses as we cannot increase income tax nor corporation tax which are high as it is.