Mark Pack

Myth exposed: how many crimes in London are really carried out by foreigners?

By | Fri 18th April 2008 - 8:31 am

The Daily Mail and the Telegraph would have us believe that one in five of London’s crimes are committed by foreigners. However, the Five Chinese Crackers blog has done an excellent demolition job on the ‘evidence’ used for this claim, concluding:

To sum up – these figures are meaningless. They don’t measure foreign nationals or immigrants at all. They don’t tell us the number of crimes the people measured are responsible for – only the rate they are accused of crimes compared to the number of crimes people who describe themselves as British are accused of. As I’ve said before, there were 447,628 crimes reported in London in the first half of 2007. People describing themselves as non-British were accused of 22,973 of those – or 1 in 20 – and actually charged with 9,878 of them – or about 1 in 45. Saying ‘Foreigners are accused of a twentieth of crime in London’ or ‘Foreigners are responsible for one in forty crimes in London’ would be closer to the truth.

But if you can’t even be sure if they’re actually foreign or not, what’s the point?

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One Comment

  • Deepak 22nd Apr '08 - 8:44am

    Do we really need a Mayor in London? There was a time when we had County council in the County Hall, London. It was nothing but trouble. People got rid of it. Now we have a position of Mayor. It seems to me that it is nothing but trouble. Do we really need Mayor is my question? I am keeping out of all this because I think that we do not need a Mayor in London.

    From: Senior Citizen Deepak

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