Leading article: Crime, yes, but still a great city

The Independent on Sunday tries to avoid the temptations to doom-laden excess in its reporting of crime. We hope that our reporting today of recent murders in London cannot be described as alarmist.

Balance is difficult to strike in such matters – not least because London is home to little more than one-tenth of the UK population. But many people come to the capital from other parts of the country, and from abroad, so the importance of its image is greater than it might otherwise be.

One of the striking aspects of the coverage of the murders of Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez, the French students, has been the portrayal in the French media of London as a lawless underworld. But that reporting is restrained compared with the picture presented by our press to the British people.

France-Soir turned an old adage of London snobbery – "never go south of the river" – into a biblical warning. Libération said that the murder of the two French students was an example of "the scourge of knife culture, which dominates some areas of London". But it was the Daily Mail that promoted anonymous French bloggers to the status of authoritative commentators on the social ills of London, revelling in their colourful language of "the city of blades", "a jungle", and "These things happen all the time in London; I lived there and 'le stabbing' is the fashion".

This is nonsense, and it is dangerous nonsense, because the first stage in dealing with a problem is to understand it. The murders of two young men, in a home, with such savagery, is so extraordinary that it cannot usefully be linked to the wider issue of teenage stabbings. And murders, even of teenagers, and even in London, remain most unusual events.

However, we believe that seeking to minimise obvious dangers is almost as irresponsible as exaggerating them. Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, was unwise, therefore, to say last week that knife crime "is not more serious than it has been previously". There is plainly a problem of violent crime in London, especially among teenagers, that is worse than it has been. It could simply be a random fluctuation in the frequency of rare events that 18 teenagers have been murdered in the capital this year, against 27 in the whole of last year. But the additional evidence that we report today, of recent increases in hospital admissions for stabbings, especially among teenagers, suggests that there is a real social change under way.

The result of that shift, which is hard to quantify, is very far from Apocalypse Now. Overall, the annual number of murders in this country has not changed much in the past 15 years, and has fallen in the past three. The risk of being murdered is so small that it should not, rationally, affect anyone's behaviour. But a rise in street violence among teenagers does change social norms, because it means that people are less willing to challenge anti-social behaviour. That leads to the kind of difficulty into which Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, got himself last week when he advised young people what to do if they saw a fight in the street: "I'm saying to kids: don't get involved, move away." The fear of knives means that people are more likely to strike a balance in favour of prudence than responsibility, with unfortunate consequences in the coarsening of the public realm.

Knives cannot be legislated out of existence – any more than broken glass (used to stab Jimmy Mizen, 16) or bricks (used to kill Ofiyke Nmezu, also 16). Of course, some things can be done, such as stop-and-search and metal detectors, although they too have a corrosive effect on the quality of trust between strangers and hence the quality of life.

Above all, we need to keep the risks of knife crime in proportion. Amazing as it may seem to those who get their information from newspapers (not including this one), London is not specially crime ridden. It has a specific problem with teenage violence, but the whole of the city is greater and better than that.

In many ways, and although Londoners enjoy complaining, it is an exciting, vibrant and rewarding city to visit and to live in. It has vastly improved over the past two decades. For culture, food, shopping and the quality of much of its varied urban landscape, it is outstanding. It is expensive, to be sure, as market forces reflect precisely those virtues. Even its transport system, which Londoners enjoy complaining about most of all (and Heathrow, its gateway to the world, is a disgrace), moves millions of people every day mostly with functional efficiency.

So forgive the London-centred focus of this crime story. The message to non-Londoners – from abroad and from other parts of the UK – is clear: don't be frightened to come to one of the best cities in the world.

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