LONDON (AP) — London’s murder rate fell in 2025 to its lowest level in decades, officials said Monday. Mayor Sadiq Khan said the figures disprove claims spread by U.S. President Donald Trump and others on the political right that crime is out of control in Britain’s capital.
Police recorded 97 homicides in London in 2025, down from 109 in 2024 and the fewest since 2014. The Metropolitan Police force said the rate by population is the lowest since comparable records began in 1997, at 1.1 homicides for every 100,000 people.
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Mayor of London Sadiq Khan speaks during an interview in London, Monday, Jan. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan speaks during an interview in London, Monday, Jan. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan speaks during an interview in London, Monday, Jan. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan speaks during an interview in London, Monday, Jan. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
That compares to 1.6 per 100,000 in Paris, 2.8 in New York and 3.2 in Berlin, the force said.
“There are some politicians and commentators who’ve been spamming our social media with an endless stream of distortions and untruths, painting an image of a dystopian London,” Khan told The Associated Press. “And nothing could be further from the truth.”
Trump, who has been directing insults at Khan for a decade, said in September that crime in the city is “through the roof.” He has called Khan a “stone-cold loser,” a “nasty person” and – in front of the U.N. General Assembly in September – a “terrible, terrible mayor.” Trump has also claimed without foundation that Khan wants to bring Sharia, or Islamic law, to London.
City officials say a combination of targeted policing aimed at organized crime and a violence reduction unit that aims to stop young people from getting involved with gangs have helped reduce violent crime.
Declining rates for murder and other violent crime are only part of London's crime story. Many Londoners have firsthand experience of phone-snatching or have witnessed the surge in shoplifting documented by the Office for National Statistics.
“It feels like the minor crimes have gone up,” said Vijay Pankhania, walking his dog outside London’s city hall beside the River Thames. “Things like stealing mobile phones from people – I’ve seen that loads of times around here.”
The Crime Survey for England and Wales, which asks people about their experience of crime rather than relying on police figures, found overall crime rose by 7% in the year to March 2025 from the previous 12 months, though it remains significantly lower than in 2017.
Arguments that London is a crime-plagued dystopia under Labour Party mayor Khan have mushroomed on social media sites, including the Elon Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter, and are echoed by opposition politicians, often tied to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views.
“There are certain politicians, certain commentators who have been using London as a punchbag” to fit their own political agenda, Khan told the AP in an interview.
“London is, in my view, the greatest city in the world. We are liberal, we are progressive, we are diverse, and we are incredibly successful,” he said.
Khan said London is a world capital for tourism, sports and culture, with “more international students than any city in the world, a record amount of foreign direct investment. Last year, more Americans came to London to study or to work or to invest since records began,” he said.
“Last year, more Americans came to London to study or to work or to invest since records began,” he said, calling London “the antithesis” of everything represented by politicians like Trump or Vice President JD Vance, who has expressed the belief that Europe is being overwhelmed by immigrants.
Khan called such views “nonsense,” but expressed concern that people unfamiliar with London, whose "sole source of information is a social media feed ... may wrongly believe that this dystopian vision of London is true.”
Mark J. Hill, Lecturer in Cultural Computation at King's College London, who studies the growth of social media posts about violence in London, said there was evidence that online discourse was shaping offline behavior.
“Posts where people are asking if it’s safe to visit London might be bots, but are just as likely to be real people who are concerned about coming to London," Hill said. “These narratives are impacting their decisions about where they might go on holiday. … That’s, in my opinion, one of the really problematic things about it.”
“There is no magic bullet at the moment for making people aware of what is statistically the case and what is misinformation or a misunderstanding of the actual reality," he said.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan speaks during an interview in London, Monday, Jan. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan speaks during an interview in London, Monday, Jan. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan speaks during an interview in London, Monday, Jan. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan speaks during an interview in London, Monday, Jan. 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The FBI says that a suspect in the arson fire at a Mississippi synagogue admitted to targeting the institution because of its “Jewish ties.”
Stephen Spencer Pittman was charged Monday with maliciously damaging or destroying a building by means of fire or an explosive, the FBI said.
The weekend fire ripped through the Beth Israel Congregation shortly after 3 a.m. on Saturday. No congregants or firefighters were injured in the blaze. Security camera footage released Monday by the synagogue showed a masked and hooded person using a gas can to pour a liquid on the floor and a couch in the building’s lobby.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — With just a few hundred people in the community, it was never particularly easy being Jewish in Mississippi's capital city, but members of Beth Israel Congregation took a special pride in keeping their traditions alive in the heart of the Deep South.
An arson fire over the weekend that badly damaged the historic synagogue's library and administrative offices made it much harder and harkened back to an era more than a half-century earlier when the Ku Klux Klan bombed the Jackson, Mississippi, synagogue because of its rabbi's support for civil rights.
Authorities early Monday hadn't publicly named a suspect, who was in custody, but the FBI promised to release more information later in the day. The suspect confessed to lighting a fire inside the building “due to the building’s Jewish ties,” an F.B.I. special agent wrote in an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court on Monday.
The suspect’s father contacted the F.B.I. and said that his son confessed to setting the building on fire, the affidavit states. Data on the suspect’s cell phone corroborated that information, the agent wrote.
Yellow police tape on Monday blocked off the entrances to the synagogue building, which was surrounded by broken glass and soot. Bouquets of flowers were laid on the ground at the building's entrance — including one with a note that said, “I'm so very sorry.”
Security camera footage released Monday by the synagogue showed a masked and hooded person using a gas can to pour a liquid on the floor and a couch in the building’s lobby.
The congregation's president, Zach Shemper, vowed to rebuild the synagogue and said several churches had offered their spaces for worship during the rebuilding process.
“As Jackson’s only synagogue, Beth Israel is a beloved institution, and it is the fellowship of our neighbors and extended community that will see us through,” Shemper said.
With the exception of the cemetery, every aspect of Jewish life in Jackson was under Beth Israel's roof. The midcentury modern building not only housed the congregation but also the Jewish Federation, a nonprofit provider of social services and philanthropy that is the hub of Jewish institutional life in most U.S. cities. The building also was home to the Institute of Southern Jewish Life, which provides resources to Jewish communities in 13 southern states. A Holocaust memorial was outdoors behind the synagogue building.
Because Jewish children throughout the South have attended summer camp for decades in Utica, Mississippi, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) southwest of Jackson, many retain a fond connection to the state and its Jewish community.
“Jackson is the capital city, and that synagogue is the capital synagogue in Mississippi,” said Rabbi Gary Zola, a historian of American Jewry who taught at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. “I would call it the flagship, though when we talk about places like New York and Los Angeles, it probably seems like Hicksville.”
The congregation was so committed to maintaining Jewish life in Jackson that, when its fulltime rabbi departed recently, congregants decided to pay for the multiyear rabbinic schooling of its cantorial soloist, Benjamin Russell, so that Beth Israel could maintain a fulltime, seminary-trained religious leader.
Because of the tiny size of Jackson's Jewish community, many congregants had interfaith marriages but still regularly attended Friday night services with their spouses in a commitment to their faith.
Beth Israel as a congregation was founded in 1860 and acquired its first property where it built Mississippi's first synagogue after the Civil War. In 1967, the synagogue moved to its current location where it was bombed by local Ku Klux Klan members not long after relocating. Two months after that, the home of the synagogue's leader, Rabbi Perry Nussbaum, was bombed because of his outspoken opposition to segregation and racism.
At a time when opposition to racial segregation could be dangerous in the Deep South, many Beth Israel congregants hoped the rabbi would just stay quiet, but Nussbaum was unshakable in believing he was doing the right thing by supporting civil rights, Zola said.
“He had this strong, strong sense of justice,” Zola said. “He was incapable of going along to get along.”
This weekend's fire ripped through the Beth Israel Congregation shortly after 3 a.m. on Saturday, authorities said. No congregants or firefighters were injured in the blaze. Firefighters arrived to find flames billowing out of windows and all doors to the synagogue locked, according to the fire department.
One Torah that survived the Holocaust was behind glass and was not damaged in the fire, according to the congregation. Five Torahs — the sacred scrolls with the text of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible — located inside the sanctuary were being assessed for smoke damage. Two Torahs inside the library, where the most severe damage was done, were destroyed, according to a synagogue representative.
Jeff Martin in Atlanta contributed to this report.
Schneider reported from Orlando, Fla. Follow him on the social platform Bluesky: @mikeysid.bsky.social
FILE - This Nov. 2, 2018 photo shows an armed Hinds County Sheriff's deputy outside of the Beth Israel Congregation synagogue in Jackson, Miss. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, file)
