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Last year, something extraordinary happened in London. As the conversation about crime got even louder, London quietly reached the lowest per capita homicide rate in its recorded history. Even London’s harshest critics have to accept this is impressive progress.
For too many, it will no doubt come as a surprise. In recent years, politicians and commentators have sought to spam our social media feeds with an endless stream of distortions and untruths – painting a dystopian picture of a lawless place where criminals run rampant.
Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump has inexplicably veered between describing London as a city moving towards sharia law, and a place with hospitals like “warzones” and areas where police don’t want to go. Here in Britain, Nigel Farage is dancing to his tune. Reform UK’s leader claimed last week that London was “in the grip of a crime wave”. Meanwhile, the party’s new candidate for mayor of London claimed that people pitied Londoners for living in a city that was “no longer safe”.
This latest startling statistic shows that those who talk down the capital at every opportunity couldn’t be more wrong: in London, the evidence is clear, we’re winning the battle against violent crime.
This hasn’t happened by chance. It’s the outcome of a strategy we’ve pursued since the start of my first term as mayor: to be tough on violent crime, and tough on the complex causes of violent crime.
We’ve more than doubled investment from City Hall in the Met, funding extra officers and giving them access to the cutting-edge technology they need to target our city’s most dangerous offenders. This is paying dividends. Police in the capital have arrested an extra 1,000 criminals every month, removed 3,750 guns and knives from our streets, and disrupted serious and organised crime groups more than 21,000 times. By closing almost 1,500 county lines operations, they’ve dismantled the violent gangs exploiting the most vulnerable Londoners and causing untold suffering.
Enforcement will always be a key part of the solution, but we know we will never be able to simply arrest our way out of the problem – especially when it comes to tackling violence affecting young people. The causes of violent crime are extremely complex, involving deep-seated issues such as poverty, inequality and a lack of life chances for young people.
That’s why I’ve invested millions in providing positive opportunities for young Londoners over the past decade, and it’s why I set up London’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) – the first of its kind in England. Working closely with schools, charities, local councils and communities, the VRU has pioneered an approach rooted in prevention, providing more than 550,000 targeted interventions and opportunities to stop young people from getting caught up in violence and exploitation.
The results of our two-pronged approach have been astonishing. London’s homicide rate is lower than rates in New York, Berlin, Brussels, Milan, Toronto and Paris, five times lower than the rate in LA, and almost 12 times lower than the rate in Chicago. Last year, the capital recorded the fewest number of homicides of victims aged under 25 this century. Our homicide rate for under-25s is now three times lower than it was when I set the VRU up in 2019, and hospital admissions of young people for knife assault have fallen by 43% in the same period.
The success of our crackdown on violent crime means Londoners are safer in their homes and on our streets. For young people in the capital, the consequences are particularly profound. Every Londoner will remember the tragic story of Damilola Taylor. A 10-year-old child full of hope for the future, Damilola was killed in 2000 by two schoolboys just a little older than him. I remember being a new father at the time, unable to imagine how it would feel to lose a child so young – nor what could lead two boys to commit such a senseless act of violence.
Last week, I visited the Damilola Taylor Centre in Peckham. It’s now home to a youth club backed by MyEnds, a City Hall-funded programme supporting young Londoners living in the capital’s most deprived neighbourhoods. In the gym, young people were boxing and playing football. In the common room upstairs, they were playing esports. Whether they were scoring goals on the pitch, learning self-defence in the ring or jostling for first place on the virtual podium, they’d all found a safe space where – with support from a brilliant team of mentors – they were free to be themselves. They were optimistic about the future, and ambitious about all the amazing things they hoped to achieve.
Of course, there is still much more to do. As far as I’m concerned, one homicide in the capital will always be one too many. As long as there are Londoners left mourning loved ones whose lives have been stolen by violent crime, we must guard against complacency. But today’s news confirms that we’re on the right path. Our collapsing homicide rate shows that the real London story is not the one spread by loudmouths and alarmists intent on sowing fear and division – it’s the one I saw in Peckham.
No one embodies that story better than Damilola Taylor’s parents. Having witnessed how alienation and apathy could drive teenagers towards violence, Richard and Gloria set up the Damilola Taylor Trust to give young Londoners the self-belief to dream of a better future – and the skills to make that dream a reality. Sadly, they are no longer with us. But we must keep on working to build the city they believed in – a safer London for everyone, and a place where no parent is forced to go through what they did.
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Sadiq Khan is the mayor of London
