Donald Trump has claimed that London is so dangerous that "people are being stabbed in the ass" as he continued to criticise the city's mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan. The US president has previously described Sir Sadiq as a "terrible mayor" and made an unfounded claim that Sir Sadiq wants to impose sharia law in London. Sir Sadiq responded by dubbing Mr Trump “racist, sexist, misogynistic,” and “Islamophobic." "My mother loved London... That was a different London than you have today. Today you have people being stabbed in the ass or worse," Mr Trump claimed in a GB News interview.
I’ve checked the legitimacy of such claims about two years ago. Can’t find my exact sources at the moment, but basically it boiled down to the following:
The knife crime rate of London (which includes any knife crime, e.g. random stop and search incidents uncovering an illegal knife and confiscating it, or basically any bladed object that gets confiscated in unrelated police searches) per 100k people between 2020-2023 was HALF of that of the knife death rate per 100k of the lowest stat US state (which, I think, was maybe Virginia?).
Basically you’re 50% less likely to run into a random knife wielder in London than you are likely to be stabbed to death in the “safest” US state (from a knife death standpoint).
And that’s not even considering that some 80% of all knife crime in London is “incident-free”, meaning the knife is confiscated before it can be used for any violent crime. Actual stabbings in London are quite rare, it’s only being amplified by two factors: the number of people in a relatively small vicinity, and the constant need of media to manufacture fear.
Yeah… You’re stating a lot of facts. Too bad no one cares about those anymore.
These statements are not made because they are true. They are made st. Everyone will talk about it. So they (a) don’t talk about other things and (b) something vague sticks in your memory like „wasn’t there something about crime rate in London?
And it often works.