London’s homicide rate is higher than New York’s only by a narrow measure, and for its population size is not the worst in the UK

A spate of recent suspected murders in London has prompted concerns about rising levels of knife and gun crime in the capital. There have been attempts to place the figures into context, both historically and by comparison with other places, but how accurate are the reports?

The Met said on Wednesday that it had recorded 55 suspected murders since the start of 2018 – including the deaths of two children whose bodies were found in Sussex. That number – marking more than a quarter of the year gone – is just over half the total in the capital for all of last year. The total in 2017 was 116, excluding the deaths in the Westminster, London Bridge and Finsbury Park terrorist attacks.

The spike has therefore been significant. If there is no let-up in the violence, by the end of the year the number of killings could reach levels last seen in 2005, when there were 181.

One of the more eye-catching comparisons has been with New York, presumably because it is etched into the public consciousness as a place associated with high levels of violence. That reputation may be somewhat unwarranted these days; the murder rate in the US city has plummeted since the early 1990s, when it stood at about 2,000 a year. But the comparison is still interesting as the two cities have a similar population size and similarly mixed demographics.

The Sunday Times was the first to report that London’s murder rate had overtaken New York’s for the first time in modern history, with 15 suspected murders in the UK capital in February and 22 in March, compared with 14 and 21 respectively in the US city.

But in January there were eight in London and 18 in New York, and the tallies for the year to date are neck-and-neck.

The latest New York police department figures show 54 suspected murders so far in 2018, although the media appear to have reported at least two more since, which would put New York ahead of London by one. Last year the number of suspected murders in New York was 292 – 150% higher than in London.

So it is premature to say London has a higher murder rate than New York, other than in the short term. And despite the negative publicity, London does not even have the highest murder rate in England and Wales when population is taken into account.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics for homicides (also including manslaughter and infanticide), filtered by particular police constabularies, show the Met had the ninth highest homicide rate (12.2 per million population) in 2016/17, or the eighth highest if the 96 Hillsborough deaths added to South Yorkshire’s tally were excluded. Excluding South Yorkshire, Greater Manchester had the highest homicide rate (19.1) and Lincolnshire the second highest (17.5).

As the UK’s biggest city by far, London would be expected to have consistently the highest number of homicides, and it has, excluding Hillsborough, but murder rates as a proportion of population are higher elsewhere, and not just in other large cities.