London Mayor Sadiq Khan is under increasingly heavy fire from his predecessor, residents and even President Trump over rising crime in the city – though Khan says police cuts from the Conservative government are to blame.
Boris Johnson, the former mayor who recently resigned as U.K. foreign secretary, tore into Khan in a recent Op-Ed for The Daily Telegraph for glamming it up at movie premieres while crime spirals out of control.
“Sadiq Khan may be a twinkle-toed mover on the movie premiere red carpet, but his pirouettes on the subject of knife crime are a positive wonder. He blames funding (when he was left with a large war chest by me); he blames the Tory Government; he blames society. He blames everyone but himself, when it is his paramount duty to keep Londoners safe,” Johnson wrote. “It is a pathetic performance.”
Johnson is the latest high-profile figure to dive into the debate over London crime. During his trip to the U.K. earlier this month, Trump doubled down on his long-standing feud with Khan, an outspoken Trump critic.
“You have a mayor who has done a terrible job in London. He has done a terrible job,” Trump said in an interview with The Sun, blaming Khan on both terrorism and crime. “I think he has done a bad job on crime, if you look, all of the horrible things going on there, with all of the crime that is being brought in.”
As of March, London accounted for 17 percent of all recorded crime in England and Wales in the year prior, as well as 42 percent of all recorded robberies. A third of all knife crime took place in London as well.
London temporarily overtook New York in the number of murders in early 2018. In February, London’s police investigated 15 murders while New York saw 11 homicides. In March, the Metropolitan Police murder numbers increased further to 22, while the NYPD’s jumped to 21. New York has since recorded more murders.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/07/30/anti-trump-london-mayor-sadiq-khan-under-fire-for-pathetic-response-to-crime-surge.html
