Londoners are sick of viral videos telling lies about their city
Comments
mbgerring
specproc
I always wonder why people zoom in on Russia, when there's so much America involved.
Trump and Musk are constantly targeting London and Khan on social media, but sure, it's the Russians driving this.
dhosek
It seems to me like a lot of the American stuff is people directly or indirectly under Russian influence or part of an international network of extreme-right politics of which Putin is the most powerful figure.
specproc
Is Putin the most powerful figure? It seems Bibi holds the most sway over Trump this month.
Don't get me wrong, I've no love for Putin, but framing the Trump project as Russian misses the huge amount of American money and effort behind him.
Is Musk a Russian agent? The Heritage Foundation? Fox? There's a huge, all-American infrastructure behind Trump 2.0.
I'm sure plenty of countries did their very best to get that guy in the Whitehouse, but I don't buy that Putin is the main character here.
tencentshill
And now you have moved the argument away from Russia. Pulling a thread off-topic like that is one of their simplest strategies. It begs for engagement.
specproc
The two most high profile actors publicly laying into London are American. Surely Ockham's razor applies here?
SanjayMehta
"They're both Russian agents."
Just a matter of time before you start hearing this again. They already tried this once using the Steele dossier.
carlosjobim
Sunshine is the best disinfectant. When you start hiding your problems and blaming those who expose them, you are on a spiral which only goes down.
It doesn't matter if your enemy also wants to promote this. If you follow this line of thought, you have to support the government of China censoring the Tiananmen Square massacre. Because their enemies in the West have for decades been talking about it.
mbgerring
We’re talking about people making things up from whole cloth, such as asserting that Haitian immigrants steal and eat dogs from white Americans in the suburbs, among many, many such examples. San Francisco has also been a target of this kind of propaganda for the entire time I’ve lived here.
I agree that social problems should be exposed. One such social problem is widespread, entirely fabricated stories of crime and violence, accepted uncritically by people who don’t live in the supposedly affected areas, driving division and political discourse that lead to real-world harm.
There is an enormous amount of evidence that this propaganda, mainly spread through social media, is a product of a foreign government strategy to interfere in the internal politics of “enemy” nations. If this is true, it should be exposed and shut down.
mothballed
I don't think it's any secret that some cultures love to eat dogs or other "pets" or unusual animals. I wonder if Trump was mixing up Haitians with some other groups.
I have a lot of 3rd world family, when I take them to the zoo they spend about half the time ogling over all the animals they've eaten or would like to eat. When I go back to their home country, I see dogs being roasted over an open fire. I have personally been offered a dog I've witnessed roasting, more than once, by a common immigrant group in America.
defrost
We're all aware of the roadside kill peccadilloes of the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, but that's hardly cause to paint them all as a third world family.
fhdkweig
> I wonder if Trump was mixing up Haitians with some other groups.
This started from a specific accusation from one neighbor blaming a missing cat on a Haitian neighbor, claiming to see it hanging dead from a tree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_pet-eating_hoax
jfengel
It is unclear to me that sunlight has ever disinfected anything. Lies spread faster than the truth.
That's not to say you'll do any good by hiding problems. It's just that exposing them isn't going to fix anything, either. You do have to fix your own problems, but you also need to get some breathing room by getting people to cease lying about it.
timbaboon
Sunshine in the UK?? :P
bragr
>There was the person with the relative in Los Angeles who was worried about going to London
This amused me because living in LA/California, I get the same style unhinged comments completely disconnected from the reality of what is happening here. We certainly have our share of problems, but you'd think we're Somalia the way certain people talk. I had a friend from Arkansas visit last summer and it definitely reset his world view a bit.
I assume this is all just deflection. It is more politically convenient to talk about bad roads or the homeless problem in California, than to address that your state's schools are in the bottom 20% of the nation.
alsetmusic
Annie Kelly recently hosted an episode of the QAA podcast about this exact phenomenon. People come to London and video themselves walking around with “scary” people around them. It’s mostly a bunch of fear-bait garbage.
The episode is titled “London Has Fallen (E356)” and was released on Jan 26 of this year. Worth a listen.
dirtbagskier
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dmoy
So London homicide rate is 1.1 per 100k? That's substantially lower than New Hampshire, Maine, and Idaho, which have the lowest homicide rates in the US.
Does seem like much ado about nothing.
jerlam
The people these videos are targeting are not swayed by facts.
dtf
All I know is, it's the end of the long Easter weekend, the sun came out to play yesterday and today and London has been looking very fine indeed.
cedws
Nah, there's a lot of truth to it. Phone snatching and looting is common but underreported because nothing ever happens. I've travelled quite a lot and other than Brussels, London (my home city) is the only one where I'm cowering and shielding my phone for fear it will be snatched. I can't leave my bag or laptop out of sight for even a second.
Petty crime chips away at society by eroding trust, it needs to be punished Singapore style.
rcxdude
You don't generally stop such crimes by punishing them more harshly, you stop them by punishing them more consistently, which is a more expensive solution.
badgersnake
Phone snatching has been a problem, but it seems like the police have got on top of it of late.
mothballed
If you read the Code of Hammurabi you'll realize we haven't made any headway on property rights in 4000 years.
thrance
Source?
jzellis
I'm an American who lives just outside London in Watford, and I'm 17 minutes from Euston Station by train. I have been all over the city and never felt unsafe or nervous or even the need to be especially vigilant. When people say there's "gun crime" here they mean that once every few months someone fires a gun and it makes the national news. I've lived all over the American West and it's safer than even the rural towns I've lived in. All of this stuff is hilariously overblown, and when other British people talk about how dangerous London is, keep in mind it's like Farmer Giles talking about how Hobbiton is too big and full of futtiners who talk funny. To an American it's hilarious. It's, like, kids with boxcutters. For anyone who's ever lived in an American city like LA, this really is the Shire. It's all right-wing propaganda cooked up by Faragewald Mosley and his Temu bootboys.
For people who make their entire personalities about what their grandpa did in the War, they're sure seem hellbent on acting exactly like the people he did it to.
mhh__
If you think Farage (an ardent zionist let's not forget) is in anyway comparable to Oswald Mosley you are genuinely an idiot, I'm sorry.
defrost
Any {X} is comparable to {Y}, a stick is long and thin compared to an orange which is shorter and round.
Farage is still breathing, compared to Mosley, and both have traded on fear of "the other" .. which others vary.
mhh__
ok so if you abstract both so aggressively as to lose all descriptive (and especially predictive) power then...
defrost
Don't despair, there is no shortage of descriptive flex for either Farrage or Mosley.
javascriptfan69
We need a social media Nuremberg
M95D
Too bad legal persons can't be executed.
Arbortheus
I’m fed up of Americans telling me London is full of knife crime when the stats say that it is much worse in the USA.
The situation is even improving, UK homicide rates are at the lowest level in 50 years [1].
Not to mention that the USA has an entire category of gun crime which is a non-issue in the UK.
I swear to you, London is not an unsafe city.
roughly
Brother, I live in Oakland. To hear it from the media, statistically I’ve been dead for a decade now. This is always the narrative around cities, which is fine, because it keeps away the kinds of people who find my town scary instead of invigorating.
jjgreen
Shhh, you should be egging them on with some outlandish tales of a close escape ... then there might be a seat or two in the pubs on a Saturday night ...
technothrasher
Eh, that same group of American folks also say that NYC is a violent crime ridden hell hole. I'm a rural guy who actively dislikes cities, but even still I've never actually felt unsafe in the time I've spent in either NYC or London.
themaninthedark
I wouldn't say NYC is a hell hole but will say they(locals) don't seem to take crime that serious there, even violent crime.
I was visiting last fall with the family, left the car in the NJ side when taking the ferry to the Statue. They took the train to the hotel and I went to retrieve the car, got a front stage view of a guy using a chain to beat up a security guard at a shopping mall.
Guy had been peeing on the vehicles, guard told him to stop. He took offense at this, got a length of chain and started kicking the door so the guard would tell him to stop. As soon as he came out guy started hitting him over the head with the chain.
Police took a good 15 to 20 minutes to respond, didn't seem interested in looking for the guy. The guard wasn't interested in pressing charges.
Guy was probably homeless and definitely needed mental health but he had the capacity to plan out and execute a violent attack that could have been deadly.
tracker1
Aren't they trying to ban knives?
defrost
Regulate, not ban, not working knives (chef, ropemaker, tech, <reason>), but "zombie" knives and other "flash" used to swing in public and intimidate (subject, say to specific performance reasons, etc.)
Love it, hate it, it's a different mindset to the US approach and ultimatelty falls back on judges using "reasonable behaviour" of common citizens on ominbuses as a yardstick.
themaninthedark
A rapper made a great song about this a while ago: https://youtu.be/YeV2cExvnMI?si=ZWhMBC1CDBGZHKNB
Also from the comment section: "knife crime, knife crime, it's ain't about knives"
You're saving that banning/ demonizing locking folding knives when almost all crimes are committed with a common kitchen knife wasnt the solution?!? I'm shocked I tell you, shocked!
defrost
Heh, great track. I mean it's no Linton Kwesi Johnson dis but it is what it is and that's enough.
Look, no one's a fan of the village idiot juggling lit dynamite on a unicycle in the packed shopping mall, and it's no good for anyone if the bad apples* aren't given a route to better things to do so Roman Law countries tend to have any old excuse laws to give cause to have people questioned as to why they're doing whatever the heck it is that they're doing .. my grandmother pulled up kids all the time like that.
The upside of such things is actually problematic and questionable bahaviour can be shunted in one direction and chefs of any colour, langauge, borough address can walk on proud and free with their knife rolls.
The downside is the watchers and guardians can get a bit enthused and selective in their choices of collar, they can develop little clique's of weirdness and corruption, and the judgy types can get a bit overly judgy about all the wrong things.
The challenge for any community is dealing with all that and having better control over the system .. takes time and focus, 'taint easy.
Havoc
They've been trying forever - it's a futile exercise.
badgersnake
It’s all got a bit ridiculous. You can seemingly lie as much as you like on video sharing sites with zero comeback.
hnlmorg
There’s no comeback for lying, period.
Though if you happen to tell truths, or even just satire, against certain wealthy people, then you can expect the full fury of those hurt.
sixothree
I got stuck at a table with a Fox News viewer who was absolutely angry about the "situation" in England and Europe. He was so focused on the Muslim immigration epidemic causing people to be unsafe and was greatly concerned about how they treat their women. Yes, I see the irony of a fox news viewer being concerned about how women are treated.
It was eye opening to me just how deeply brainwashed these people are. This wasn't just him parsing news events, it was his world view being shaped with the opinion that these are awful, dangerous, unsafe places, ridden with crime and poverty.
dominotw
i live in chicago. gun crime is localized to certain parts of city.
Is it the same with knife crime?
rcxdude
Violent crimes in general in the UK (at least) are more localised to who you are. Random acts of violence on bystanders are very rare, the vast majority are attacks by someone known to the victim, often gang related.
turkey99
I’ve never seen any knife crime anywhere.
There isn’t really any location. Its socioeconomic. It’s young black men 16-24 who disproportionately end up dying to knife crime.
sourcegrift
What are the root causes behind "socio-economic"?
geysersam
There are many. It's an umbrella term for a range of circumstances that tend to be correlated with poverty and social issues.
Low trust in society, few opportunities to improve economic situation, higher prevalence of trauma and ptsd, higher probability of substance abuse, low opportunity cost for going to jail, fewer good role models, worse self esteem, worse education outcomes, worse physical health, higher likelihood of being involved in organized crime, higher likelihood of depending on parallel social structures for safety and protection, etc.
Each can be cause or effect in a self reinforcing network. Picking one single root cause isn't really possible.
mothballed
One seems to be culture.
For instance, I was caught between a knife fight on a train, because in one hood some of the culture is it's unacceptable to play another culture's music too loud. A Hispanic guy was playing hispanic music quite loud on the train, as soon as it entered a black neighborhood a black guy informed him it was "his hood" and asked him to stop, which then escalated to both pulling out knives.
I have now learned there are certain socio-economic enclaves where culture has dictated that I must not play my music too loud or I will be stabbed to death.
frereubu
In London? Where was this?
mothballed
San Diego
frereubu
Ah, gotcha - I misread.
jasonmp85
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badgersnake
I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve never seen any knife crime.
cucumber3732842
I live in "one of those parts" of "one of those cities" specifically to get away from white (in spirit if not also complexion) people with no real problems (or more specifically, what they do to a local government).
As long as you don't make activities outside of the law a non-negligible source of your income or run with the crowd that does you're fine, and not just for murder or whatever, theft and all sorts of the boring "area under the curve" crime is concentrated around these people too.
jeffbee
For homicide this is very correct. You could live dead center in the statistically most violent block of Chicago and still cut your personal risk of being a homicide victim by 1) not being a criminal, and 2) not posting diss raps to your 11 followers on Soundcloud. There are not really dangerous neighborhoods but there are dangerous social networks.
doubled112
I'm also a big believer that "head up, voice down" will reduce your likelihood of becoming a target.
People don't usually bring trouble to themselves for no reason. Don't give them a reason.
mothballed
And not having any vehicle problems, because you usually only are rolling through bad areas to get to better areas. Most people in violent cities have no occasion to stop in violent areas. On one occasion I was forced to work overnight for critical hospital operations in a bad part of town, on my way back my tire went flat and when I was distracted fixing it the locals noticed I was weak and they put a gun to my head.
TitaRusell
America is running a disinformation campaign against Europe.
Europe represents democracy and rule of law- something right wing fascists and Christian fundamentalists despise.
Make no mistake we are involved in an ideological war against the US.
rob_c
Flight from London is happening. It's already happened in a large way as well.
You don't see cockney anything anywhere there anymore compared to (and as much as you see any transitional regional identify left in) other British cities.
Homicide is on the drop in London but that's not 100% because it's safer. A huge amount is focused on deaths rather than attacks so don't fool yourself that just because they didn't die that nothing happened.
> crime which is a non-issue in the UK.
Nope. Not even close to true. Yes we don't have school shooters. Yes we don't have people exacting "justice" with a loaded barrel. But we do have gun crime and guns are used a LOT as intimidation. I wish I didn't grow up in an area where I know that to be true.
Trying to pretend there's not a problem is wonderful. And in that case I can point you to some very reasonably priced areas which must be perfectly safe and have no social cohesion issues at all regardless of where you're from...
alexriddle
Hospital admissions are reliable indicators for violent crime and stabbings in particular - if you get injured you're going to need a doctor and they will record it - and these are going down [1]. There is little to suggest any kind of epidemic or increase in violent crime is going on and the stats on this seem to play out.
What is more of an issue is more antisocial crime such as street robbery or shoplifting. These crimes are much more likely to be snatch and grab, with no violence involved. They still have an impact on the victims but they're not making the city significantly more violent.
[1] https://www.london.gov.uk/london-records-fewest-homicides-ye...
lazyasciiart
> Flight from London is happening. It's already happened in a large way as well
None of the people I've known who moved out of London did so because of crime or safety. They almost invariably moved because they could pay for a tiny place in the city and commute for over an hour each way or they could pay the same for a larger place outside the city and commute the same length of time on the train.
hnlmorg
Exactly this. It’s what I did and it’s what a not so insignificant number of my friends and colleagues have done too
nxm
None of the people you’ve known is not reflective of what may actually be occurring
lazyasciiart
This opinion is coming to you directly from the burned out debris formerly known as Seattle, so I think I’m pretty good at identifying imaginary disaster zones.
frereubu
But you've not cited any sources either, so don't pretend that you're some paragon of statistical analysis. You've just said things like "I wish I didn't grow up in an area where I know that to be true," which is pure anecdote. Others in this comments thread have provided sources. Why haven't you?
orf
> You don't see cockney anything anywhere there anymore
Yes, jellied eels disappearing is because everyone has fled London due to crime. No other reason.
badgersnake
> Flight from London is happening.
That’s more to do with cost of living. Rents and house prices are insane.
jeffbee
There's a gigantic global industry of telling people that a far away place they've never been is bad and dangerous. This industry exists to make people overlook the objectively bad and dangerous place where they actually live. This plays out on global and national scale. For example, my family who live in Oklahoma City are constantly yapping about some fearmongering they saw about San Francisco, when their city has like 4x the homicide rate, traffic violence, poverty, substance abuse, even manmade earthquakes. But they are plugging into a 24x7 stream of disinformation.
dylan604
If you visit some place outside your local city, you might experience a broader swath of people, culture, and beliefs. That makes you a dangerous person. You might start questioning why you've only been told one thing. Sadly, just traveling within the US can get you some exposure, but it's mainly just variations of the same thing with perhaps some external influences that have been absorbed. It's nothing like going to abroad and experiencing totally different cultures.
Scary social media videos about those foreign lands is just another tool to dissuade people from wanting to expand their experiences. If you research into some of this global industry, you'll see a lot of the influencers are spokes from central hubs of propaganda sources that shockingly are financed by the same people.
givemeethekeys
Absolutely. Every country's local media will try to get people to stay home and spend money locally, and not complain because elsewhere is much MUCH worse!
It also makes it easier to dehumanize people in-case of a conflict.
jerlam
This isn't limited to far-away places. There are plenty of influencers and social media shills that specifically parrot how bad cities are - to people who live in those cities. Hyper-local news outlets that no one outside of the city would read are filled with crime reports and people giving all kinds of warnings. Even decades ago, local news would excitedly report on crime because it draws viewers.
Almost every single large city subreddit needs to have some kinds of rules restricting crime posts, because people love to post every single act of crime that happens and it eventually takes over the sub. Then "alternative" subreddits are created and the cycle continues.
Scaring people has always been profitable, social media just lowers the bar. It's not just old people anymore.
--
I almost fell into one of these traps. It was a guy walking around the dead San Francisco mall and talking about how it was DEVASTATED and SF was COLLAPSING. I had actually been there recently and yes, it was pretty empty. The Youtube algorithm seized on this and started showing me more videos.
Except one of the videos was on a street next to me. The video was just the one guy walking around two blocks that were empty, but looped over and over for 20+ minutes. So it was clearly nonsense.
I checked his channel again. It has paid subscriptions and a PayPal link. He gets minimum 50K views on every single video, with some hitting 800K. He makes two a month. That's an easy income.
chasd00
Everyone hates people who are not them. I live in a pretty plain middle class neighborhood just Southeast of downtown Dallas (oakcliff). People here talk about the absolute cesspools that are the... safest neighborhoods with good jobs and consistently top rated public schools in North Dallas only because they're also the wealthiest. They just can't stand people who are not like them for some reason.
jeffbee
To be fair the wealthy neighborhoods of North Dallas are notorious hotbeds of crime. It's just not the types of crimes that get reported on right-wing TV.
chasd00
you'll have to give me some examples. My boys are 16 and 14 and have fortunately managed to get in to the top magnet HSs in DISD (TAG and SEM) but if i had to do it over again, and had the means, I'd choose to raise my kids in Preston Hollow/Highland Park any day.
jeffbee
Tax evasion, fraud, etc. Chiropractors organized as limited partnerships, that type of thing.
socalgal2
I don't know anything about Oklahoma City but I'm pretty confident that SF is a shit hole having lived there up to 2024 and seeing it first hand every day. Any stats that claim otherwise are lying.
pojzon
As a Eastern Europe citizen, I see absolutely no reason to visit western europe like “ever”.
Every time I did visit due to business or family trip, we were either mugged or pestered or cursed at.
Maybe visiting small villages is better but main cities are like “no-go” zones for civilized ppl.
You may not agree but I built this opinion on own experience and nothing will change it.
Dig1t
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londonnogood
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rob_c
In defense of London from London...
Frankly if that's not an example of Stockholm syndrome I don't know what is.
It's so far from the nicest city on the country. It's entirely held up by "drip down" wealth from the banks and tourism which to paraphrase Chinese airways "avoid certain areas".
mhh__
In turn I'm sick of myopic fools using foreign stupidity to cover up the undeniable truth that there is a huge problem with petty crime and anti-social behaviour in london e.g. the boss of M&S wrote a letter on this just recently
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/apr/03/marks-spenc...
> I keep hearing crime is falling, especially in London - something none of us believe and very few people working in retail would see. In fact, we see the absolute opposite in our High Streets and in our stores, where our colleagues are on the receiving end of abuse and violence in their workplace every day.
> It is becoming more brazen, more organised and more aggressive.
> Across the UK, there were around 5.5 million incidents of shoplifting last year, and that excludes the vast number that go unreported. Every day, more than 1,600 retail workers face violence or abuse. This is not isolated. It is systemic and it is getting worse, not better.
This book doesn’t cover the UK specifically, but it does detail Russia’s well-publicized strategy of promoting reactionary media narratives to destabilize the United States and the EU. I feel like at some point, people will need to start taking this seriously, instead of continuing to act like people suddenly just started telling insane racist lies on the internet for no reason. https://icct.nl/publication/russia-and-far-right-insights-te...