Daylight robbery is a term that could have been coined for London's glitziest West End shopping streets, where crime spikes in the afternoon not late at night.
Stung by the incessant posts on social media highlighting thefts and raids, city bosses are fighting back against what they see as wild distortions over the safety of London's streets.
Dee Corsi, the chief executive of the New West End Company, an umbrella body for 600 businesses operating in the shopping areas around Oxford Street, told The National the city cannot afford to let crime harm its image. Ms Corsi said it was time for London to fight back against its reputation for crime.
She said London is not the only city hit by mobile phone thefts, a point backed up by the Met Police which says Madrid has more phone thefts per resident.
“The stats speak for themselves. We are a safe city,” Ms Corsi said. “The violent crime is reducing, so is the phone theft.
“For me this is really about changing the perception. So we've got to be better, telling the good news stories and the successes that we have.
“We invest huge sums to give the best experience to visitors, whether they be domestic or international visitors, or indeed, residents and others,” she said. “So it's really, really important that we can't let our reputation get tarnished.”
The area around Oxford Street falls within the borough of Westminster, home to London’s famous tourist attractions which attract millions of visitors, as well as the thieves who prey on them. Violence peaks in early afternoon when footfall is highest and criminals can use the dense crowds as a physical shield.
Footage of gangs that tear luxury watches from their wealthy victims’ wrists has been seen around the world. 61,233 mobile phones were snatched on the streets of central London in 2025, and knife crime almost doubled in the decade to 2024. All elements that contribute to the reputational damage.
This week, a video appeared on social media showing sword-wielding men in crash helmets brandishing their weapons at terrified passers-by, as others smash their way into a shop on a moped and make off with several expensive watches.
The Tuesday morning robbery, in the upmarket Knightsbridge area, occurred just over a week after the city’s authorities released figures showing murders were at a record low.
The announcement was the latest from Mayor Sadiq Khan and the Met Police aimed at restoring London’s reputation as a safe city for international visitors. That image has been dented in recent years by soaring levels of street crime.
Even US President Donald Trump has weighed in, claiming there were parts of London that people were unwilling to visit, and renewing his feud with Mr Khan who he described as a “terrible, terrible mayor”.
But with signs that the police are beginning to turn the tide on some street offences, Ms Corsi said a survey of visitors to the West End at the end of last year found high levels of satisfaction over safety on the streets.
When asked to rate their sense of personal safety out of 10, visitors gave an average score of 8.2. Overall, 77 per cent of respondents rated their satisfaction with personal safety at eight out of 10 or higher. “I think it's frustrating because I’m a Londoner through and through and come here every single day – I bring my children to the West End,” she adds.
In a bid to tackle crime, New West End Company funds private security teams to patrol alongside the police and these were stepped up over the Christmas holiday.
Ms Corsi said the Met Police is turning its focus from serious crime towards the lower-level but high-volume offending that has blighted central London, including the organised criminal gangs behind phone thefts.
“This is important context because … with police resources relatively stretched, they've had to focus on the big, serious crimes.”
This has meant high-volume crime “has taken a bit of an increase”, she said. “But I think it's fair to say that they have shifted that focus now.”
The City of London this week said its research shows it remains the world’s premier financial centre.
Dame Susan Langley, the Lady Mayor of London, said she would be urging high-profile figures in sectors such a banking and the law to counter the crime reputation.
“We need to push back firmly against disinformation and be much more proactive with the City's narrative,” she said.
“It's not right that our position is unfairly undermined on the world stage. London is a global leader – statistics show that it is one of the safest and best places in the world to invest, work and live.
“The City and the financial and professional services sector must stand up and tell the story of our success, stability and innovation.”
Mr Khan recently announced local council tax rises to pay for more funding for the Met Police, including to tackle phone thefts.
Statistics released by the police show here were 97 murders in London in 2025, an 11 per cent decrease compared with 2024 and the lowest total since 2014. The Met Police said this was the “lowest since records began”. The current recording system began in 1997.
The UK capital’s homicide rate stands at 1.1 per 100,000 people, lower than any other British city and below many comparable global cities.
These include New York (2.8), Berlin (3.2), Milan (1.6) and Toronto (1.6). It is also significantly lower than rates in major US cities such as Los Angeles (5.6), Houston (10.5), Chicago (11.7) and Philadelphia (12.3).
Writing in The Guardian newspaper, Mr Khan said “politicians and commentators have sought to spam our social media feeds with an endless stream of distortions and untruths – painting a dystopian picture of a lawless place where criminals run rampant”.
Neil Garratt, the leader of the Conservative Party group in London's City Hall, said while the Mayor is right to push back against Mr Trump’s “unreasonable” attacks, the core issue of crime still remains.
He accused Mr Khan of “using that rebuttal of Trump's inaccurate attack to smuggle through some cherry-picked claims of his own”.
Mr Garratt said that in 2024–25, there were 10,017 robberies involving knives – of the type witnessed at the Rolex store in Knightsbridge – compared to 4,494 when Boris Johnson was the Conservatives’ mayor.
“These offences impinge on people’s life and are pretty terrifying,” he told The National. “It's the kind of story that you would talk to about friends, and I think social media reflects that, so I think that's why you have this perception in London that it's become more dangerous.”
Mr Garratt accused Mr Khan of “gaslighting Londoners on crime, telling people they’re falling for a social media hoax” and that releasing figures about murder was the “right answer to the wrong question”.
“He uses carefully selected data, such as on murder which is genuinely low in London. But he knows that knife crime has been higher in every year of his mayoralty than the last year under Boris [Johnson], even in the pandemic year.
“Worse, the increase is all down to soaring knife robbery, a terrifying crime where a law-abiding person is ambushed by a knife-wielding criminal demanding their valuables, along with the epidemic of mobile phone thefts, with one stolen every six minutes.”
Mark Hill, an academic at King’s College London, has been tracking social media activity, in particular Reddit, about crime in London, looking back 20 years.
His research reveals the challenge the city faces to turn around its reputation in the face of a prevailing narrative.
Dr Hill, a lecturer in cultural computation in the Department of Digital Humanities, says his analysis shows there is no relation between the number of posts and the statistics released by the Met Police that show crime is going down.
“We know that emotional or triggering online content, which could be Tweets or Reddit posts … is engaged with more and spreads more quickly, especially when it's negative,” he told The National.
“We know that if people engage with this type of content more frequently than other types of content that the algorithm amplifies that and will push it up higher.
“This interaction has an echoing effect where it actually goes further as people engage with it more, and in some ways, that just helps drive the narrative.”
The Met Police highlighted successes such as theft of phones and other personal items being down by 23 per cent in Westminster in 2025.
In October last year, it said it had dismantled a suspected smuggling gang, in the UK’s largest phone theft crackdown, which was suspected to have smuggled up to 40,000 stolen phones from the UK to China.
“We know that volume crime such as theft, shoplifting and burglary remains a concern and we are making progress in tackling this,” the Met said.
