Despite the claims that London is ‘lawless’, I’ll be honest: I broadly feel safe in the city I’m lucky enough to call home. As a born and raised Londoner, it has changed beyond recognition in just the 25 years I’ve lived here – and looking even further back, the stories my parents tell of how crime-ridden the capital used to be in the 80s and 90s feel incredibly distant.
That was until my housemate was mugged at knifepoint outside our front door in a quiet residential street in south London. Just after 9pm on a sunny summer’s evening, he was approached by two people in ski masks who flashed knives at him and asking him if he wanted to “do it the hard way or the easy way”. They took the contents of his bag – including his passport, house keys and headphones – he only managed to keep his phone in his pocket because when asked by the muggers where it was, he panicked and said he didn’t have one. For some reason, they believed this.
For something like this to quite literally happen on my doorstep is obviously anxiety inducing. But what shocked me even more was the Met’s response – or lack thereof. Despite reporting it immediately after it happened, a police officer did not attend to take a statement for a full 48 hours. In the intervening time it fell to me and my housemates to play detective to appeal for CCTV from our neighbours and retrieve any items the muggers had dropped or discarded. (After posting on Nextdoor, someone found our housekeys nearby – though we’d already changed the locks.)
And when an officer did attend, she told my housemate there was very little that could be done because he had not contacted them until the muggers had fled the scene. Apparently he should have phoned them whilst being mugged, during which he was trying to stop them from stealing his phone... The irony was that by waiting two whole days to even attempt an investigation, the police had compounded the likelihood that the two knife-wielding perpetrators would fail to be caught. With this experience in mind, it’s entirely unsurprising that the police only solve an average of one in 20 muggings in London.
These people are likely still roaming the streets of south London, able to go onto mug even more people
What might the Met say to this charge of serial failure? Some might say the police need to prioritise crimes they deem serious and which have a reasonable chance of being solved. That is an argument that has been levelled at me when I previously wrote about my experience of getting my phone pickpocketed and the police simply gave me a crime reference number and sent me on my way. In that situation I kind of get it. But I am baffled that the same attitude is seemingly being applied to a crime involving two people threatening someone with knives. These people are likely still roaming the streets of south London and able to go on to mug even more people, a prospect which fills me with dread.
This incident clearly crosses the line into violent crime with potential for actual or grievous bodily harm, which should most definitely be a police priority, even if tracking the perpetrators may prove difficult. If nothing else, bungling investigations with self-inflicted delays hardly seems like a deterrent to would-be muggers.
So if this isn’t a police priority, what is? Less than a month after my housemate was mugged, almost 900 people were arrested at protests in support of Palestine Action, and a further 532 were arrested on August 10. Among the latter group, half of those detained were over the age of 60, including 15 over 80s and one man who was both blind and uses a wheelchair. Most were arrested for holding placards that read ‘I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action’, with one woman filming her arrest at September’s protest over an incomplete sign that didn’t even have the proscribed group’s name written on it. These protests were a large-scale policing exercise; videos from the protests often show multiple officers removing individual protestors and the number of arrests eclipse even the 1990 Poll Tax riots.
Ultimately, despite stretched resources, it is down to the police to prove that our city isn’t ‘lawless’ – by keeping communities safe. They are having more success than is realised by many: data published last week shows that violent crime in the capital is falling year on year, and our homicide rate is lower than other major global cities like Paris, New York and Berlin. Meanwhile, other UK cities including Birmingham and Manchester have higher overall crime rates than London’s.
But that doesn't mean that so-called neighbourhood crime doesn’t matter. If Londoners do not have faith that the police care enough to keep them safe, it does our great city’s image no favours and makes it vulnerable to those who don’t have its best interests at heart.
Sophie Butcher is a Social Media Editor
