Londoners are sick of viral videos telling lies about their city
by pseudolus on 4/6/2026, 6:31:39 PM
https://www.londoncentric.media/p/london-crime-viral-videos-crime
Comments
by: mbgerring
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. <a href="https://icct.nl/publication/russia-and-far-right-insights-ten-european-countries" rel="nofollow">https://icct.nl/publication/russia-and-far-right-insights-te...</a>
4/6/2026, 7:53:36 PM
by: 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.<p>The episode is titled “London Has Fallen (E356)” and was released on Jan 26 of this year. Worth a listen.
4/6/2026, 8:01:39 PM
by: 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.<p>Does seem like much ado about nothing.
4/6/2026, 8:52:08 PM
by: bragr
>There was the person with the relative in Los Angeles who was worried about going to London<p>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.<p>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.
4/6/2026, 8:37:10 PM
by: 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.
4/6/2026, 8:13:09 PM
by: 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.<p>Petty crime chips away at society by eroding trust, it needs to be punished Singapore style.
4/6/2026, 8:21:28 PM
by: 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.<p>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.
4/6/2026, 8:05:02 PM
by: javascriptfan69
We need a social media Nuremberg
4/6/2026, 7:47:00 PM
by: 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.<p>The situation is even improving, UK homicide rates are at the lowest level in 50 years [1].<p>Not to mention that the USA has an entire category of gun crime which is a non-issue in the UK.<p>I swear to you, London is not an unsafe city.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgk86rr0vxyo" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgk86rr0vxyo</a>
4/6/2026, 7:41:28 PM
by: 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 <i>manmade earthquakes</i>. But they are plugging into a 24x7 stream of disinformation.
4/6/2026, 7:48:56 PM
by: londonnogood
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4/6/2026, 7:42:03 PM
by: Dig1t
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4/6/2026, 8:22:07 PM
by: rob_c
In defense of London from London...<p>Frankly if that's not an example of Stockholm syndrome I don't know what is.<p>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".
4/6/2026, 7:53:53 PM
by: 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<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/apr/03/marks-spencer-calls-crackdown-retail-crime-clapham" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/apr/03/marks-spenc...</a><p>> 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.<p>> It is becoming more brazen, more organised and more aggressive.<p>> 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.
4/6/2026, 8:17:18 PM