Right-Wing Media Watch: London phone theft hits four-year low, yet the media remains silent

Phone theft and robbery offences in London fell to their lowest August level in four years. Yet, if you relied on the right-wing press for your news, you might never know it.

New figures shared by the Metropolitan Police show phone theft and robbery offences fell to their lowest August level since 2022. In the West End, where nearly half of all phone thefts in London take place, offences have fallen sharply, with over 9,000 fewer thefts recorded in the last 12 months.

Commander Andy Featherstone, the Met’s lead for tackling phone theft, noted how phone theft offences are now at a four-year low “because of the Met’s relentless campaign to crack down on these criminals’’.

“This was our biggest operation yet, with officers targeting every stage of the organised criminal chain, including street thieves, handlers and exporters.”

London Mayor Sadiq Khan welcomed the progress, saying the “tide is definitely turning” on mobile phone crime in London with 16,000 fewer mobile phones stolen in the past year and neighbourhood crime falling further too.

“Record funding from City Hall is empowering the Met to go after every single part of the £50million-a-year trade in stolen phones.”

Yet this is precisely the sort of development that has struggled to attract the attention lavished on stories portraying London as a crime-ridden dystopia.

One of the few outlets to give the issue attention was LBC, which published an article by Khan, arguing that progress on phone theft and other crime “has not happened by chance.”

“Backed by massive investment and support from City Hall, the Met has launched the largest anti-phone theft operation in the history of the UK,” he wrote.

Predictably, the article’s comments section became a platform for racist abuse and hostility towards the London Mayor, with some contributors seeming more interested in attacking the mayor than engaging with the figures.

“Loving the comments on this thread, denying the facts and angrily stating their hate,” one commenter observed.

The reaction reflects a wider pattern in the political campaign against Khan, from the hostility directed at his Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) expansion to the relentless attempts to discredit his record as mayor.

As we have previously explored, Khan has become a convenient whipping boy for the right, with opposition to ULEZ often descending into a campaign of personal attacks. The irony is that the policy was originally conceived under Boris Johnson when he was London mayor.

And this selective approach to London’s record on crime is nothing new.

Figures released earlier this year by City Hall and the Metropolitan Police showed that neighbourhood crime had fallen by around 14 percent over the preceding 12 months, equivalent to roughly 35,000 fewer offences across the capital.

Several outlets, including the BBC, LBC and the Independent, reported the figures prominently. Yet, much of the right-wing press showed considerably less enthusiasm for reporting evidence that challenged its preferred narrative.

The Daily Mail, the Sun and the Daily Express have all found plenty of column inches for stories depicting London as a city in decline. Evidence of falling crime, however, has proved far less enticing.

Consider the Daily Express’s coverage of the previous year’s crime figures, when it declared that Khan had been “humiliated” by supposedly “buried” statistics exposing the “true extent of lawless London.”

Rather than offering a balanced assessment of crime trends, the paper presented the figures as ammunition against the mayor.
When crime figures worsen, the public deserves to know. When they improve, the public deserves to know that, too.

Yet the disparity in coverage suggests that, for much of the press, crime is newsworthy primarily when it reinforces an established political narrative. Stories that portray London as a lawless mess are useful weapons against a Labour mayor; evidence of progress is considerably less convenient.