In July 2021, I went to Marble Arch in order to ascend the newly-opened Marble Arch Mound, Westminster Council’s well-intended but disastrous attempt to draw visitors back to a West End that had been hammered by the pandemic.
The friend I had arranged to meet was on the pavement outside Marble Arch station, and I crossed the road to join him. He was consoling a woman, who was accompanied by a small child. The woman was in floods of tears. A thief, with ruthless speed, had unzipped the little purse attached to her waist and made off with the phone it had contained.
An assumption may exist that because much of the West End of London, like much of Westminster, is rather grand it is relatively untroubled by crime compared with parts of London linked in the public mind with danger and poverty. But crime statistics have long told a different story. It is a story we need to catch up with if the most recent official figures from the Office for National Statistics and the Metropolitan Police are to be best understood and the problems they point to dealt with as effectively as possible.
The ONS released a new set of crime data at the back end of last month, covering the 12 months up to September 2024. For London (including the small City of London area, and data from its own separate police service) some of the numbers could be seen as heartening. For example, they showed again that, contrary to much right-wing media commentary, the capital as a region has one the lowest rates of violent crime and violent crime with injury in England and Wales.
However, London did have, by a small margin, the highest overall rate of crime per 1,000 people in its population. A big element of this was the number of crimes categorised as theft of various kinds. This had increased by ten per cent compared with the equivalent 12-month period (to September 2023) and within that ten per cent theft from the person had gone up by 43 per cent and shoplifting by 50 per cent. There were just over 80,000 recorded cases of shoplifting and 97,357 of theft from the person.
These numbers and their upward trends are, quite obviously, worrying. It is helpful to identify which parts of Greater London experience the highest incidences of theft from the person and shoplifting, so that effort and resources can be deployed accordingly.
The Met’s crime dashboard enables us to look at its recorded crime data in finer detail. Its overview of all crimes breaks down the overall figures by category, by borough and by month, going back to 2021. Its theft category is further broken down into four sub-divisions: “theft from the person”, shoplifting, bicycle theft and “other theft”.
From the Met’s stats we can see that recorded theft as a whole has been on the rise in Greater London since the time when the Covid tide went out. During 2022 a total of 242,698 crimes categorised as theft were recorded by the Met in Greater London’s 32 boroughs combined. In 2023, that number was 282,074. Last year it was 330,989.
Dig down, and we find that theft from the person and shoplifting have been the drivers of that upward path: in 2022, there were 57,472 theft from the person cases and 38,160 shoplifting cases recorded; in 2023, the respective figures were 72,713 and 57,476; and in 2024, they were 102,551 and 88,374.
(The bike and “other” theft totals have stayed broadly the same over those three years, ranging in the first case from last year’s 16,100 to 2022’s 18,351 while “other theft” – by far the biggest Met dashboard theft sub-category – has first gone up and then, last year, down to 115,619, the lowest of the three annual totals).
This general pattern of rising reported theft with the from-the-person and shoplifting varieties responsible can be found all over Greater London. For example, 7,647 cases of all forms of theft were recorded in Lewisham in 2024 compared with 5,593 in 2022.
That 2,000-plus hike is more than accounted for by recorded theft from the person in the borough going up from 671 in 2022 to 1,768 in 2024 and by shoplifting going up from 1,195 cases to 2,561 over the same period. The direction of travel has been essentially the same in, to pick just three, the very different boroughs of Bexley, Haringey and Harrow.
By far the biggest theft volumes, though, are in Westminster, where that poor woman-with-child had her day ruined outside Marble Arch station on July 2021 – a time during which the pandemic actually brought about big dips in crimes rates in general – and where the UK’s hottest retail, culture and hospitality hotspot, the West End, is located. They also break down in different proportions.
- In 2022, there were 42,773 recorded theft cases of all kinds in Westminster. In 2023, there was a big increase to 55,809 cases and in 2024, a further one to 59,114.
- The theft from the person numbers within those totals have gone up from 17,506 in 2022, to 24,530 in 2023 and then to 32,641 in 2024 – not far short of doubling in two years.
- The figures for shoplifting in Westminster were a significantly smaller 3,533 in 2022, rising to 4,989 in 2023 and 6,492 in 2024. Again, the 2024 shoplifting case number isn’t far short of twice the size of that for 2022, but it is also much smaller in Westminster than for theft from the person.
- Over the three years, between 17.6 and 19.8 per cent of all recorded theft in Greater London has happened in Westminster – a very big chunk for one borough out of 32. And the percentage of theft from the person cases recorded there in 2024 was a much bigger 32 per cent. That’s almost exactly the same as in 2022 and 2023.
- At the same time, although the number of shoplifting cases in Westminster rose significantly between 2022 and 2024 and an outsized percentage of all Greater London shoplifting cases is recorded there, that percentage has been going down a little, even as the numbers have increased: from 9.3 per cent in 2022, to 8.7 per cent in 2023 to 7.3 per cent in 2024.
What does that last sequence tell us? Not that shoplifting is on the decline in Westminster – on the contrary – but maybe that the rest of Greater London has caught up a bit. Meanwhile, theft from the person has also risen across London, but is still heavily concentrated in Westminster, with its quantity there increasing very fast.
As always when handling crime statistics, caution is advised and usual caveats apply.
Firstly, those discussed here are offences reported to and then recorded by the Met, and not every offence is reported. Secondly, rises in the numbers of some crimes recorded can be a reflection of the public become more eager to report them because they are in the public eye – in that sense, an increase can be seen as a good thing in the sense that a fuller picture of what is going on emerges.
But none of that means the rises in shoplifting and theft from the person across London are not real or often deeply distressing for victims. Why has this been happening? How can it be stopped? Those are questions for another article on another day.
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