How dangerous is London, really? This is something we keep getting asked on our Facebook page. People from around the world say they'd love to visit but are afraid. So we've looked at some other major cities to see how we compare.
Murder
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime published some figures a few years ago for the most populous cities in each country. The 'intentional homicide count' for London in 2011 was 100; see how that compares with other major cities and tourist hotspots.
And here's the homicide rate per 100,000 population for those same cities in 2011, which is a much fairer way of comparing cities of differing sizes.
So we can see that London may have had more actual murders than cities like Paris, Toronto and Berlin, but the chances of being a victim are roughly the same — based on population. Of course, your chances of being murdered — which are already tiny — are much more likely if you are: poor, in a gang, in a violent relationship or already involved in crime. The likelihood of being randomly stabbed or shot is much, much lower than these statistics indicate.
Robbery
This is probably higher on the list of concerns than being actually killed. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime can help us out here, too — though it should be noted that its figures include robbery with violence and bag-snatchings, but not pickpocketing.
You'll also note that these figures are by country. We've included the Metropolitan police's London robbery figures for the year to March 2016; the other figures are for 2013, which is the latest the UN has them.
That's not very helpful; how on earth do you compare enormous Russia with Singapore? Here's the robbery rate per 100,000 population instead.
Even then, comparing London to entire countries isn't very satisfactory. All this tells us is that you're more likely to get robbed in London than some small village in the Cotswolds, Siberia or North Dakota. Well, duh.
There's also an issue around what counts as robbery in each country. It's a lot easier to tell when someone's dead, but the UNODC has separate entries for 'robbery' and 'theft' and we suspect there's a large crossover between the two.
The reason we've had to resort to comparing countries is that, once you move away from homicide, city-specific crime statistics are quite hard to find. And then when you can find them, they aren't necessarily from the same years.
Categorisation issue also rears its head. When looking at an annual report from Toronto we used the 'Robberies (Other)' statistic, but it's not clear to us whether that includes violent robberies or whether they would fall under 'Crimes Against Person'.
Sources: London; New York; Berlin; Toronto; Sydney
Sexual assault
Being groped or something far, far worse may also play on the mind of someone (likely a woman) pondering a trip to London. So here are the rates of sexual assault and rape per 100,000 population.
Well, that looks fairly terrible. How about comparing some major cities again?
Bloody hell.
How on earth do we explain this? We're definitely coming up against problems of categorisation again — New York figures include rape, 'felony' and 'misdemeanour sex crimes'; Sydney covers sexual assault and 'acts of indecency'; UNODC figures for each country cover rape and sexual assault, including those on children. For some reason, there are no figures from the United States for all sexual assault, only rape, so that's what the first chart shows. And Germany doesn't separate out sexual assault by länder at all so we don't know the situation in Berlin.
With sexual assault comes another issue: under-reporting. Countries with a high stigma around rape, or where police forces may not be all that sympathetic to victims, are probably not recording the extent of the problem. Let's face it — we know it's happening here, so it's going to happen elsewhere, too. That does not, however, explain the far higher numbers in London than New York (population 8.4m), Toronto (population 2.6m) or Sydney (population 4.3m).
We asked the Metropolitan Police for a statement but given all the problems with categorisation and different time frames, the press office didn't feel it was appropriate to comment.
