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Good morning. Apparently, gangs of “feral yobs” now rampage the streets in “lawless Britain,” where even your wing mirrors aren’t safe from brazen thieves. It doesn’t matter that crime is decreasing: most people, when asked, seem to think it’s on the rise.
This is the finding of a study from King’s College London published earlier this week, which surveyed nearly 4,000 people in Britain. It found perceptions of crime far removed from reality and shaped more by feelings than by facts. Reform voters are most likely to believe that crime is a growing problem, and many of them think that most people convicted of homicide are ethnic minorities (they aren’t). This isn’t confined to one party, though: the public as a whole tends to wrongly assume most people convicted of homicide are from an ethnic minority when they are not, and to think crime is going up when it isn’t, according to the study.
This paradox puts politicians in a tricky position. Tell people they’re wrong and they lose the argument; pledge to crack down and they reinforce the idea that crime is out of control. It also reflects how, on social media, people are disappearing into algorithmically determined rabbit-holes and reaching strikingly different conclusions about reality. For this morning’s newsletter, I spoke to Bobby Duffy, director of the policy institute at KCL and one of the report’s authors, about how to respond. That’s after the headlines.
Five big stories
UK politics | Andy Burnham has urged local leaders to offer all rough sleepers in England a route off the streets by Christmas, as he pledges another £100m to end street homelessness.
Ukraine | Ukraine’s former defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov has called for a wartime presidential election in the most direct political challenge to Volodymyr Zelenskyy since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
US news | Lawyers representing 29 US states have accused Meta of covering up internal research showing Instagram was addictive for teenagers.
Environment | Carbon pollution has fuelled a “massive expansion” of marine heatwaves in Europe this summer, research has found, with some waters recording temperatures 6C higher than normal.
UK news | The company behind Grenfell Tower’s flammable cladding gave more compensation to its shareholders than to victims of the disaster, an investigation has found.
In depth: When emotion frames perception, myth-busting doesn’t work
For the most part, Britain is a far safer country than it was in the past. Rates of homicide in England and Wales are the lowest they have been since 1977. Domestic burglary has decreased by about 50% since 2010. So has vehicle theft, and even phone theft, which has fallen by 70% over the same period. I had to double-check this final statistic with Duffy, as on first glance I thought it couldn’t be right: there has been such a relentless focus on phone snatching, particularly in London, that I’d assumed the opposite. “We’ve verified this a dozen times, as I had exactly the same instinct,” he says. “But phone thefts are way down compared to 2010.”
Despite this, most people seem to think that crime is trending upwards. This is particularly the case among Reform voters, who believe that 34% of people are victims of crime each year (the actual figure is 9.7% – still far too many people, but fewer than most seem to assume). Part of the reason for this misperception is that certain highly visible, low-level crimes have increased. The King’s College surveys find that shoplifting has increased by about 70% since 2010, a remarkable surge.
Duffy suggests that the general perception of rising crime is tied to a mounting sense of disorder as people see others breaking the rules. Although there is less reliable data on fare dodging, it is a very visible form of disorder (and one that’s been capitalised on by the likes of Robert Jenrick, as a sign of social decay).
As Duffy puts it: “people see others completely disregarding the rules in a way that is much more blatant, and it gives a sense of the rules not mattering”.
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Why do people think crime is increasing?
It doesn’t help that the media environment is saturated with stories of criminals, which rarely give readers this wider context. Nick Ross, a former presenter on Crimewatch UK, recently told BBC journalist Mark Easton that scriptwriters would sometimes try to insert lines into the programme acknowledging that crime was decreasing. But “time and time again, producers would say, no you can’t say that, that’s not what this programme’s about”.
Not all publications run endless stories about serial offenders, and the King’s study finds that people who get their information from newsletters (hello!) or broadsheets are more likely to gauge the actual level of crime, and less likely to think murder is on the rise. But on social media, which is where most people now get their news, creators churn out racist AI slop that feeds into a perception of ambient criminality. RadialB, a creator who has made deepfake videos of masked Black men descending on Croydon, told the BBC that he uses the prompt “roadmen wearing puffer jackets, track suits, and balaclavas” to make his videos, because those are the “funniest” characters.
That this content isn’t real has little bearing on its persuasiveness. As Duffy puts it: “people’s feelings and political identities are driven more by emotions than they are driven by facts”. Liberal democracy is rooted in the idea that politics occurs in a shared reality where people are invested in the pursuit of shared facts. But what if those facts have no bearing on what people think? “That’s got huge implications in the sense that simple myth-busting won’t work,” Duffy says. “Because it’s misdiagnosing the cause of why people feel this way in the first place.”
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The right narrative
Alongside swipes about “weird Turkish barber shops” and “not seeing a single white face,” the right seems to favour the narrative that crime is rising because it implies things were better in the past, when England had proper binmen, salt and vinegar chipsticks, and fewer immigrants. The King’s study finds that Reform wrongly guess that 70% of people convicted of murder are from ethnic minorities (in fact, it’s 35%), and that almost 44% of those voters think that Britain has a “two-tier justice” system which gives more lenient sentences to ethnic or religious minorities (it doesn’t).
Meanwhile, politicians often talk “tough” on crime to appease voters who wrongly believe things are out of control, in turn reinforcing the perception of lawlessness. Consider Portugal’s prime minister saying in 2024 that high-profile raids on immigrant communities in Lisbon were important for creating “visibility”, or Keir Starmer’s pledge to halve violent crime in 2023 despite rates having decreased significantly since the 1990s. “The risk is, if we think everything is going downhill, we won’t pick out the things that are actually going downhill and then act on them,” Duffy says.
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What needs to change?
If the misperception of crime is tied to a sense of public disorder, one reaction is to simply criminalise disorder. The most famous example of this was in 1990s New York, where the city instigated a “broken windows” style of policing that criminalised begging and graffiti. Ever since then, sociologists have argued that this approach disproportionately targeted minorities and homeless people. And as Libby wrote yesterday, taking a harder-line approach to antisocial behaviour can put vulnerable people at greater risk.
The government recently passed legislation that means shoplifting offences can be charged as general theft, raising their maximum sentence to seven years. The change is yet to come into force. But adding yet more people to an already overcrowded prison system, where opportunities for rehabilitation are scant, feels like a pretty poor solution. A better idea would be addressing the reasons people shoplift to begin with: in the Midlands, for example, the police refer some prolific shoplifters to intensive drugs rehabilitation programmes.
“Part of what we’re fighting against here is: how do you reinvigorate town centres, and make people feel like the place where they’re living in isn’t declining?” Duffy asks. “This is caused by massive economic forces, including cost of living pressures. And a lick of paint and mending some broken windows isn’t going to change that.”
What else we’ve been enjoying
Move over, Mario – Sonic was the real hero of my childhood, so I loved Keith Stuart’s celebration of 35 years of the fastest hedgehog ever. Sam Coare, newsletters team
I’m determined to see the inside of the Lloyd’s building when it opens to the public later this year after reading Alice Fisher on this crazy hi-tech oil rig of a landmark. Hettie
Sirin Kale makes for fascinating, if not harrowing, listening for the Full Story podcast about her investigation into the author Christopher Berry-Dee, who stands accused by multiple women of violence, rape and sexual assault. Sam
Nesrine Malik’s column about what comes after “Woke 1.0” – a movement that had safety, dignity and equal opportunity at its heart – is well worth a read. Hettie
Musician and author Stephanie Phillips’ new book, We Were Here: A History of Black People and Alternative Music, is published next week, and if this Rolling Stone UK extract on Blackness being “inherently punk” is anything to go by, it will make for essential reading. Sam
Sport
Fifa | Israel became the latest Fifa member to officially withdraw their support for Gianni Infantino’s re-election in a letter sent by the head of the Israel Football Association (IFA), Moshe Zuares.
Cricket | With Pakistan at a low ebb and England at the start of semi-reset, the series at Headingly looks to be an interesting one.
Basketball | The WNBA said in a statement that fans asked by security to cover shirts at Monday’s match that had messages about transgender women participating in women’s sports, should have been allowed to wear the shirts.
The front pages
“Burnham pledges to get all rough sleepers off streets by Christmas”, is the Guardian’s front page today, while the i Paper writes “No rough sleeper still on streets by the end of 2026, pledges Rayner”.
The FT has “Long-term borrowing costs hit highs as inflation and fiscal deficit fears rise”, the Times goes with “Power shift puts growth in hands of No 10 North”, and Metro leads on “PM sticks to his drones as Vlad plots revenge”.
The Telegraph splashes “I’m going to cope, King said of cancer”, the Express writes “‘I was longing to tell someone the King has cancer’”, and the Sun’s headline is “Look at my husband … nothing stopped him”.
The Latest
Russia threatens UK over supplying drones to Ukraine
Russia has threatened the UK with ‘consequences’ after reports that British drones were used by Ukraine to strike targets on Russia’s mainland for the first time. The Ministry of Defence has rebuffed these threats, saying the UK is ‘committed to providing equipment Ukraine needs to defend itself against Putin’s illegal invasion’. Annie Kelly speaks to senior international correspondent Luke Harding.
Cartoon of the day | Rebecca Hendin
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Breakups are usually the stuff of sad songs, but three shows at this year’s Edinburgh fringe are taking a more inventive approach, Brian Logan writes. Elf Lyons turns the collapse of her relationship into surreal, emotionally charged theatre; Kate Dehnert combines standup, rave and primal scream after a decade-long relationship ends; and Ele McKenzie finds the comedy in moving back in with her parents. Three very different takes on heartbreak, and proof that sometimes the finest comedy material comes from wreckage.
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
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