alt Hacker NewsFine, but also how to explain the crazy claims flying around the internet that London is a warzone and a no-go area? I live here and... seriously, nothing has changed. I feel perfectly safe and always have.
Yeah sure, there's some phone theft, it's not great. This phone theft wave is just a symptom of everyone carrying £500 devices around. Big cities have always had theft, pickpocket and snatching crimes. But it's nothing astonishingly new or different. I know one person who had their phone snatched, never seen it happen myself.
So how to explain this massive wave of social media posts making out that London's unsafe? There is definitely a narrative being pushed, whether by Russian bots or not, I cannot say.
Because everyone that experiences the crime stops tolerating it and leaves. This is why the area around the greenbelt so closely resembles the inner cities of 20 years before. This isn't some new phenomenon - Lee Kuan Yew famously described the newspaper purchasing arrangement at Piccadilly Circus in the 1950s, which was incomprehensible by the 1980s.
I'm old enough to remember when they had posters telling people not to wear iPod white earphones because that will get you mugged (and it would) - pure blaming the victim nonsense.
If London defenders were half as enthusiastic about cleaning up their city as they are about attacking anyone pointing out the all too obvious problems they genuinely would be in utopia.