Discussion

Londoners are sick of viral videos telling lies about their city

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.[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgk86rr0vxyo

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...

badgersnake: > Flight from London is happening.That’s more to do with cost of living. Rents and house prices are insane.

dominotw: i live in chicago. gun crime is localized to certain parts of city.Is it the same with knife crime?

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"?

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".

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.

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.

badgersnake: I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve never seen any knife crime.

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. https://icct.nl/publication/russia-and-far-right-insights-te...

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.

cucumber3732842: I live in "one of those parts" of "one of those cities" specifically to get away from white 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.

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.

orf: [delayed]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 and not invigorating.

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.

mothballed: If you read the Code of Hammurabi you'll realize we haven't made any headway on property rights in 4000 years.

tracker1: Aren't they trying to ban knives?

Havoc: They've been trying forever - it's a futile exercise.

Dig1t: I see a lot of videos like this, but many of them are videos of someone just walking through an area of London and just commentating.Many areas look exactly like the Middle East, with 0 native English representation.I don’t see how these videos are lies.London is minority native British and entire country will be minority native by 2045.WRT knife crime, the most damning clips that hurt the reputation of the UK come from UK media itself, clips like this:https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pnAwKLXjguwOr this:https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z3R6m24LU3AIdris Elba (famous guy) on the BBC, talking about how “not all knives need to have a point on them”.It’s an obvious question: if knife crime is not a problem why is government media talking so much about banning pointy knives?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

timbaboon: Sunshine in the UK?? :P

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.

mhh__: ok so if you abstract both so aggressively as to lose all descriptive (and especially predictive) power then...

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.

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.

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.

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