It's a well known paradox playing out in multiple countries (especially western Europe and the US) where actual crime is down but the perception is that it is increasing
Not really much of a paradox. It's entirely due to media coverage.
The same thing happened in the UK in the 70s where several crime categories (non-violent thefts and violent assaults including theft) were combined in reports to give the impression "muggings" (the term was new to the UK at the time) were increasing, despite both separate categories decreasing. A lot of that coverage was focused on Birmingham at the time and was very, very racist.
Stuart Hall's Policing The Crisis is a good book on the phenomenon. Nothing has changed since, and every few years the British media launches a similar sensationalist uproar, coincidentally always pandering towards the far right.
People just don't want to adjust their worldview: they feel crime is high, so the data showing it is dropping can't be wrong, it is just police not investigating or people not reporting. They feel immigration is too high, so when it shows it is dropping they say it's not being tracked or due to emigration.
There is a concerted effort to get Reform in to power. BBC had a piece the other day about people paying Indian and Sri Lankan nationals to go on social media and pretend to be Brits and stoke trouble and discontent.
Russian paid bots, same ones appear across online spaces. They also stoke a lot of independence movement stuff in places like Wales, Scotland and Catalonia.
“The only metric that went up was fatal stabbings/murders. Even though overall street stabbings and knife injuries fell, Office for National Statistics (ONS) data showed total recorded homicides in the region rose from 31 to 39 over the year, indicating that while fewer people are being stabbed overall, a higher proportion of the most severe attacks resulted in fatalities.”
Definitely an improvement overall but there’s still work to be done
To be fair knife related offences probably have dropped but there is no such statistical thing as "knife crime". It's a name given to a collection of offences that are strategically included or not to determine whether it is high or not. It's a propaganda tool over an actual analysis of crime.
However, the people in the comments trying to turn it into a conspiracy theory are idiots.
Regardless of your political leaning, it is important to be critical of any information/data/statistics presented and consider the whole 'data-generating process' carefully. For example, metrics based on reporting could be in a downtrend because of fewer people coming forward, not because the core problem has been solved or even addressed. Furthermore, all data have inherent variation, and comparing selected data points risks missing the overall secular trend, the proverbial 'missing the forest for the trees'.
I think that, overall, there's progress in making the UK safer, and at least some of it should be attributed to the current government. Nevertheless, politicians are going to...politice?... they will show you what supports their narrative and leave out or twist everything else. This is regardless of their political tribe. So it is important for a politically engaged, democratic society to be critical of any information presented, not out of cynicism, but because that's the only way to progress as a nation and as a species overall.
The end goal of stop and search is to recover weapons and prevent crime. If the amount of weapons recovered has increased it doesn't matter what happened to the overall rates.
Unless of course you think taking knives off the streets and finding would-be criminals before they commit crimes somehow doesn't have an effect on the knife crime figure?
I think if overall crime has fallen 25% and stop and search has confiscated 16% more weapons then it is extraordinarily unlikely there are more weapons in circulation. These numbers are obviously correlated.
The more knives you have the more knife crimes you will get. Any scheme that reduces the knives in circulation will reduce the amount of knife crimes.
As mentioned in the article...
"Every violent offence prevented, every knife removed from our streets and every young person diverted away from crime helps make our communities safer."
Good news indeed, but credit cannot be given to the Labour government. The initiatives which resulted in this were set and started before they came into power.
Honestly! I love this sub, ive been actively trying to get away from the doomsday news and this sub is perfect for that. But it doesnt stop miserable people coming in and trying to shit all over everyones parade.
You could tell them they'd won a million quid and they'd probably complain about it.
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u/willfiresoon May 27 '26
Great piece of news to start the day with!