London is a “fantastically safe” city, according to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, despite the fact that there have been 885 murders in the capital since 2015.
As he visited a boxing club in Ilford, east London, on Thursday, the chief of Britain’s largest police department said that the city is a place to “live, work, and enjoy yourself.”
However, statistics reveal a rise in murders between April 2021 and March 2022, with 124 reported by the London Police compared to 119 the year before.
The police agency had just released data showing that the number of adolescent homicides had decreased by half in 2022, and had pledged to tighten down on crimes targeting children.
Mark Sir said: “London is a fantastically safe global city.”
After a spate of high-profile convictions of officers for major offences, he was questioned about his strategy for rooting out criminal activity inside the Met.
When questioned about how he intended to restore the public’s faith in the police, he responded as follows: “I have got tens of thousands of men and women who are fantastic people, who care and want to make a difference.
“But I’ve got many, many more people who care about Londoners than some of those awful individuals that should never have been police officers.”
According to statistics provided by Statista, 124 reported murder offences were claimed to have occurred between April 2021 and March 2022 in London, up from 119 in 2020–21.
885 murder offences have been reported during the last seven years, with 159 of them occurring between April 2017 and March 2018.
Knives are reportedly the weapon of choice in the city, with knife crime offences in London increasing from 9.7 thousand in 2015–16 to 15.59 thousand by 2019–20, according to the website.
Following the release of recent data from Ilford showing that 36% of mugging victims were 18 years of age or younger, the Met has committed to expand high-visibility patrols and strengthen community policing aimed at preventing robberies.
According to the Home Office Counting Rules (HOCR), there were 109 murders overall in 2022, which is 17% less than in 2021, according to the Met.
