By James Hanson

As a Londoner who’s both witnessed and been the victim of crime in the past year, there’s something especially galling about the Met commissioner’s dismissal of the city’s crime problem.

It is gaslighting on a grand scale.

Speaking to my LBC colleague Nick Ferrari this morning, Sir Mark Rowley said complaints about lawlessness were ‘politically motivated’.

He also disputed a report by Policy Exchange that London is the phone theft capital of Europe, and declared “this is a safe city”.

Perhaps the Met chief moves in loftier circles than I do, but in my corner of south London crime is both highly visible and pervasive. Phone snatching is rife, shoplifting is normalised, and youths in balaclavas roam........

© LBC