glamour, grit and shiny shiny cars
The headline figure is that, so far this year, 315 cases of kidnapping have taken place across the capital.
This sounds a lot, but don’t be treating your ‘The Wire’ boxsets as documentaries just yet. After year-end the Met tends to do further analysis, and reclassifies around a third of cases so that should bring the figure down a bit, as long as Father Christmas doesn’t go on a bit of a crime spree from his sleigh in the next fortnight.
Plus, London’s a packed city of 7.5 million people, so we calculate that you had about a 1 in 25,000 chance of being kidnapped (or, we suppose, kidnapping someone else). And you survived the odds, right? right?
Reading a bit more into this, the GOOD NEWS is that in 80% of cases the police rescue the kidnappee. The BAD NEWS is that successful prosecution only comes in 20% of cases (although we hope this is because they are prosecuted for false imprisonment, assault, abduction etc instead).
So how does your borough compare? Have a scan below. Two caveats – 1) we’re not sure why Heathrow shows up here, not being a borough 2) these aren’t always where the snatch happened, or indeed where the hostage is held – it’s where they are reported:
Newham 34
Lambeth 22
Greenwich 19
Southwark 18
Redbridge 16
Tower Hamlets 16
Lewisham 15
Waltham Forest 15
Barking & Dagenham 14
Haringey 13
Croydon 12
Enfield 12
Hillingdon 11
Harrow 10
Bexley 9
Hammersmith & Fulham 8
Bromley 8
Hackney 8
Havering 8
Brent 7
Westminster 7
Camden 6
Islington 5
Wandsworth 5
Sutton 4
Kingston 3
Barnet 3
Hounslow 2
Merton 2
Richmond 1
Heathrow 1
Ealing 1
Kensington & Chelsea 0
Total 315
This is being written in sunny Southwark (not far off the top of the league). Very much of this Londonista’s own free will, I hasten to add.
Wire Image from sezzy_boy’s Flickrstream