According to data obtained from the Office for National Statistics and a web scrape of the online ‘Crime’ pages of the Daily Mail, the Metro, and the BBC’s crime pages, the correlation between volume of crime reporting and crime rate has weakened substantially over the last two years.
To take the BBC as one example, while in early 2020 a large downtick in crime led to matched decrease in reporting, albeit with an overly large correction upward once crime increased again, by mid 2022, the volume of crime reporting fluctuates much more erratically and separately from crime rate.
In January 2024, which saw the lowest crime rate in 9 months (barring December, a frequent lull month), they published their highest number of crime articles in that same amount of time, one of only four times they published more than ten in a month in the entire preceding three-year period.
A spokesperson for the Mayor of London said: “Far too many commentators and politicians continue to talk our capital city down, but the evidence is clear: you are less likely to be a victim of violent crime in London than in the rest of England and Wales.”
Indeed, homicide rates in London have reached record lows, with the lowest per capita rate since records began, while neighbourhood crime is down 14 per cent, with 16,000 fewer offences, including 10,000 fewer phone thefts over the past year.
In terms of the correlation between crime rate and volume of crime reporting, however, things take a turn for the even worse in late 2024, with two almost completely inexplicable peaks in July and October.
In each of these two months, the BBC published 16 crime articles, a new record for the period over which data is available (since January 2020), despite no great increase in crime in these two months.
This record is thoroughly trumped, however, by April of 2025, when a substantial 4% drop in the crime rate leads to the number of BBC articles on crime more than doubling in one month to a new record of 17.
When crime once again rises in May, the next month, by 5%, the number of articles drops to a mere 3.
Such a deterioration in correlation can be charted using the correlation coefficient over time, comparing how closely tied the two measures were in each year.
Beginning with a statistically significant correlation of more than 0.5, crime rate and volume of crime reporting at the BBC have since tended towards nil, indicating no correlation.
Finn Fallowfield, resident of Finsbury Park, said: “Living in Finsbury Park, you see a fair amount of news articles about crime in the area, and more so recently it feels like, but it never seems to match up to your experience of how it really is.
“When people come to visit my house, they often come with fears and preconceptions they’ve built up from reading about the area, that I have to convince them are unfounded.”
The story we have seen at the BBC is not too dissimilar to the Metro and the Mail, however, even if data does not stretch quite so far back.
At the Mail, a drop in crime levels in Feb 2025 is neatly accompanied by a drop in crime reporting, while the rest of the year sees inverse correlation take hold, with a steady increase in crime from April to June accompanied by a steady decrease in reporting, while the precise opposite becomes true for July to September.
Meanwhile, the Metro, also owned by DMG group, spends 2024 correlated quite closely, but completely disengages crime reportage volume from crime levels for almost all of 2025 save for March and September.
Charted together, the three newspapers’ trajectories are markedly similar, potentially pointing toward a more industry-wide trend.
The BBC, the Metro, and the Daily Mail were all reached out to for comment.
Featured image credit: Tshrinivasan, CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
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