London’s crime is falling fast. So why has much of the right-wing press gone quiet?

For years, Britain’s right-wing newspapers have portrayed London as a city spiralling into lawlessness. Stories about violent crime, phone thefts and failing policing have been staples of the news agenda, frequently accompanied by attacks on Mayor Sadiq Khan and claims that the capital has become unsafe.

But what happens when the facts no longer fit the narrative?

New figures released by City Hall and the Metropolitan Police show that neighbourhood crime in London has fallen over the past year. Compared with the previous 12 months, neighbourhood crime is down by around 14 percent, equating to roughly 35,000 fewer offences across the capital.

The decline has been driven largely by reductions in theft, robbery and burglary, with Central London seeing some of the biggest improvements following intensified police operations targeting street crime and mobile phone snatching. Those efforts alone helped cut theft offences by around 13,000.

Last year, London’s homicide rate fell to its lowest level in more than a decade, while the city’s violent crime rate is now lower than that of many comparable European cities, including Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Milan, as well as every US state.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said the figures demonstrate “London is safe and getting safer each year.”

“This reduction reflects a wider policing approach and the dedication and hard work of local officers, working with specialist colleagues across the Met, using cutting-edge technology, to bring more criminals to justice,” he said.

“When neighbourhood policing works, its impact reaches far beyond local crime. Strong relationships with communities help us prevent and reduce wider forms of violence.

“These latest statistics are a massive achievement and come after we also announced at the start of the year that serious violence was down, making the capital an even safer global city for Londoners and international visitors alike.”

The figures prompted Sadiq Khan to call out those who have repeatedly depicted London as a “crime-ridden dystopia,” namely Nigel Farage, Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

“Whether Musk, Farage, or the captains of online disinformation, they want to paint London as a dystopian hellhole,” the mayor said.

“These latest stats on high-volume crime show crime is coming down even further. London is getting safer.”

Given the scale of the decline, you might expect the story to dominate headlines. After all, a double-digit fall in crime affecting tens of thousands fewer victims would, you’d hope, be regarded as major news.

Several outlets, including the BBC, LBC and The Independent, did report the figures prominently. Yet their absence from much of the right-wing press was notable. The Daily Mail, The Sun and the Daily Express have all found plenty of column inches for previous stories portraying London as descending into chaos but showed little enthusiasm for reporting evidence that points in the opposite direction. Take the Daily Express‘s coverage of last year’s crime figures, when it declared that Sadiq Khan had been “humiliated” by supposedly “buried” statistics exposing the “true extent of lawless London.”

It suggests that, for some outlets, crime statistics are newsworthy only when they reinforce an existing political narrative. Positive developments under a Labour mayor are far less useful than stories that can be weaponised to depict London as an emblem of national decline.