Domestic abuse has led to almost as many homicides this year as gang-related violence, police figures show.
The Metropolitan police said the homicide rate in London had slowed after a spate of killings earlier in the year. At one point the rate was up 158% on last year, but it is now only slightly ahead.
There have been 100 homicides in the capital this year, and that milestone was reached at the earliest point of the year since 2008. At this point last year there had been one fewer.
Of the 100 homicides this year, 22 were gang-related and 21 were linked to domestic abuse, the highest figure for two years. Much of the political focus has been on gang-related violence, linked in part to the drugs trade, but domestic abuse has claimed 15 female lives and six male.
The Met recorded 116 homicides in London in the whole of 2017, excluding the deaths in the Westminster, London Bridge and Finsbury Park terrorist attacks. In the first quarter of 2018, there were 46 homicides in the capital, a rate of more than three a week. If that rate had continued, the annual toll this year would have surpassed 180, the worst since 2005 when there were 181.
The Met’s assistant commissioner Marin Hewitt said: “The thing I am confident of is we are suppressing the level of violence more generally, and that’s what leads to the murders.”
In April it was suggested that London was heading for a higher murder rate than New York, but by the start of this month there had been 197 homicides in the US city this year. Hewitt said: “I think those comparisons were unfortunate at the time, there is quite a considerable difference.”
The Met said 55 of the 100 homicides took place in public spaces such as streets or shopping centres and 45 took place in houses or flats, which Hewitt said were harder to prevent.
Forty of those killed were aged under 25, including three children under eight years old. Fifty-five victims had criminal records, and 75 of those charged were previously known to police.
The Met said 102 men and nine women had been charged in the cases. There are more charges than recorded homicides because some offences have more than one suspect.
Sixty-four people died in stabbings, 10 in shootings, four by strangulation, four in arson attacks and 18 after assaults.
The official clear-up rate, where a suspect is charged, has climbed to 85% this year, from 62% last year.
Det Supt Stuart Ryan, head of performance for the Met’s homicide unit, said that in the past six weeks, three people had phoned police to say they had killed someone.
Senior investigators continually complain about high workloads, saying their teams have as few as half the detectives they need. Many say they are having to work harder and longer to fill in the gaps, caused at least in part by government funding cuts.
There is a national shortage of detectives and the Met points out that it is trying to recruit more. It has a record number of posts requiring training to detective level.
The Met has 18 full murder squads, down from a peak of 31 when the homicide rate was higher. Hewitt said there were no plans to increase the number.
