London's homicide rate fell in 2025 to its lowest level in decades, officials said Monday, with Mayor Sadiq Khan saying the figures disprove claims by US President Donald Trump and others on the political right that crime is out of control in Britain's capital. Police recorded 97 homicides in London in 2025, down from 109 in 2024 and the fewest since 2014. The Metropolitan Police force said the rate by population is the lowest since comparable records began in 1997, at 1.1 homicides for every 100,000 people. That compares to 1.6 per 100,000 in Paris, 2.8 in New York and 3.2 in Berlin, the force said. "There are some politicians and commentators who've been spamming our social media with an endless stream of distortions and untruths, painting an image of a dystopian London," Khan told The Associated Press. "And nothing could be further from the truth." "London is, in my view, the greatest city in the world. We are liberal, we are progressive, we are diverse, and we are incredibly successful," he said. Trump, who has been directing insults at Khan for a decade, said in September that crime in the city is "through the roof." He has called Khan a "stone-cold loser," a "nasty person" and - in front of the UN General Assembly in September — a "terrible, terrible mayor." Trump has also claimed without foundation that Khan wants to bring Shariah, or Islamic law, to London. City officials say a combination of targeted policing aimed at organized crime and a violence reduction unit that aims to stop young people from getting involved with gangs have helped reduce violent crime. While the murder rate has gone down, other crimes such as phone-snatching and shoplifting have been on the rise, according to the Office for National Statistics. The Crime Survey for England and Wales, which asks people about their experience of crime rather than relying on police figures, found overall crime rose by 7% in the year to March 2025 from the previous 12 months, though it remains significantly lower than in 2017. Arguments that London is a crime-plagued dystopia under Labour Party mayor Khan have mushroomed on social media sites, including the Elon Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter, and are echoed by opposition politicians, often tied to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views. Khan said London is a world capital for tourism, sports and culture, with "more international students than any city in the world, a record amount of foreign direct investment. London ranked third globally for international tourist arrivals in 2025 with 22.7 million visitors, according to Euromonitor. London held second place in the 2024 rankings after Istanbul, but has never ranked first in international arrivals. Greater London attracted 265 foreign direct investment projects in 2024, making it Europe's leading region, but this represented a 31% decline from 359 projects in 2023. The US remains the largest source of tourists to London, but was overtaken by India as the top source of technology-related foreign direct investment to the UK for the first time in 2024. "Last year, more Americans came to London to study or to work or to invest since records began," Khan said, calling London "the antithesis" of everything represented by politicians like Trump or Vice President JD Vance, who has expressed the belief that Europe is being overwhelmed by immigrants. Khan called such views "nonsense," but expressed concern that people unfamiliar with London, whose "sole source of information is a social media feed ... may wrongly believe that this dystopian vision of London is true." Mark J. Hill, Lecturer in Cultural Computation at King's College London, who studies the growth of social media posts about violence in London, said there was evidence that online discourse was shaping offline behavior. "Posts where people are asking if it's safe to visit London might be bots, but are just as likely to be real people who are concerned about coming to London," Hill said. "These narratives are impacting their decisions about where they might go on holiday... That's, in my opinion, one of the really problematic things about it." "There is no magic bullet at the moment for making people aware of what is statistically the case and what is misinformation or a misunderstanding of the actual reality," he said. — Agencies
