Mayor Sadiq Khan has dismissed Donald Trump’s claims that London is crime-ridden as ‘misinformation’.

The US President zeroed in on the Labour mayor during his 55-minute UN speech – saying he’d allowed crime to go ‘through the roof’.

But Khan has hit back, highlighting statistics from the mayor’s office for policing and crime showing a 12% fall in violent offences over the last two years.

Figures also show that since replacing Boris Johnson in 2016, Khan has overseen a 17% fall in the homicide rate.

Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan said: ‘We’ve seen a number of politicians here and across the globe talking down London and spreading misinformation about crime and safety in the capital.

‘The evidence is clear, our approach to tackling crime and its complex causes works. It’s driving down violence right across the capital.’

Trump isn’t the only politician to have accused Khan of overseeing a crime wave in the capital.

Tory MP Robert Jenrick told Times Radio that young Londoners don’t feel that ‘London is a safe city they want to live in’.

Meanwhile, Susan Hall, Crime Spokeswoman for the City Hall Conservatives, has accused Khan of failing to fulfil Labour’s manifesto pledge to ‘take back the streets’.

The mayor’s office figures on violent crime compared the twelve months ending in August with the previous twelve months.

All 32 boroughs saw violent crime fall, with Havering’s 16.3% drop the biggest, followed by Enfield’s 16.1% reduction.

Greenwich saw the smallest decrease of 4.3%, followed by Kensington and Chelsea’s 4.6% fall.

The homicide rate fall was calculated by comparing the twelve months to June this year with the twelve months to May 2016.

Overall homicides in London are at a ten-year low, according to the mayor’s office and better than Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Madrid and all major US cities.

Office for National Statistics data, also showed Londoners are less likely to be a victim of violent crime (26.4 offences per 1,000 population) than across the rest of England and Wales (31.9 offences per 1,000 population).

However, Susan Hall has previously pointed to figures that suggest certain types of crime are rising in the capital.

The Tory politician often highlights knife crime – with research from the Policy Exchange think tank showing  that such offences have risen by nearly 60% in three years.

Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Rachel Williams said: ‘Violence with injury is down in every single borough – a clear sign that our approach is making a difference.

‘Homicide is now at its lowest level in a decade, violent crime resulting in injury has fallen and firearms discharges are less than half what they were seven years ago.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

On September 28 1975, staff at the Spaghetti House restaurant in Knightsbridge were confronted by a terrifying sight.

Three robbers had stormed into the restaurant, holding a sawn-off shotgun and two handguns demanding that week’s takings of £11,000 (£117,921 in today’s money.)

They barricaded staff in the basement and had a getaway driver at the ready.

But the plan was left in tatters after the alarm was raised by one of the managers who managed to escape their clutches.

More than 400 officers, including firearms teams, later surrounded the building. After holding the hostages for six days they were later released unharmed.

The armed trio were affiliated with Black action groups, later claiming the raid was a political act. But this explanation was dismissed by detectives who treated it as a robbery gone wrong. A court later heard claims that the robbery was launched to raise funds to pay off a gambling debt.

While the restaurant was once known as one of London’s go-to Italian restaurants, it closed in 2015 after the landlord decided to redevelop the block into luxury shops.

However, some locals remember how one of the most affluent neighbourhoods on the planet was transformed into a no-go zone as police with guns, shields and chattering radios surrounded the restaurant on that fateful day.

Faisal, an Egyptian pensioner who lived near the Spaghetti House and still resides in the area just 100 metres from Harrods, told Metro he was told by police to leave his flat in the aftermath of the raid.

He told Metro: ‘It was chaos. There were lots of police sirens and then they all parked up outside the spaghetti house. I used to eat there it was a great place and very popular.

‘A police officer told me to leave my flat as there was an “armed incident”. It was only the next day when I got my paper that I realised what had happened in Knightsbridge of all places.

‘Because I was not directly opposite the restaurant and in the firing line I suppose, they let me return to my flat. All of the locals watched what was going on from behind the police lines though. It was like watching a crime film, it was very surreal.’

He joked: ‘Harrods remained open but I had to go the long way round, which was inconvenient.’

A concierge at a local flat block nearby told Metro: ‘I wasn’t around when the siege happened but my dad was working round the corner at the time.

‘He told us kids what had happened. We were very shocked and he said he and his workmates had been evacuated.

‘It was a big deal at the time. When the Spaghetti House closed I suppose the memories went with it.’

While nearby residents remember the siege as a terrifying attack, for the Met Police it marked the first time they used groundbreaking fibre optic technology to monitor the scene.

Two tiny cameras were placed in the building to film the gunmen, with one being pushed through a vent, while an audio device captured their conversations as it unfolded.

As well as Met hostage negotiators, a psychologist was brought in to analyse them and their threat level.

Through the covert operation, police established the gang leader as Franklin Davies, and began to work up a profile of him.

Davies told officers during negotiations that he was a member of Black Liberation – an organisation modelled on the Black Panthers in the US.

He demanded the release of two black prisoners, even though they had already been freed.

He also requested a visit to the scene from the Home Secretary and an aircraft to facilitate the group’s escape to the West Indies.

The only concession the police allowed was a demand for a radio so the robbers could listen to the way the siege was being reported.

Although police initially categorised the robbery as a terrorist act, the Met Commissioner at the time Sir Robert Mark later dismissed any political motivations.

He later wrote: ‘From the outset it was rightly assumed that this was a simple armed robbery that had gone wrong and any attempts by Davies to represent it as a political act were received with the derision they clearly deserved.’

On October 3, the group gave up and released all the remaining hostages after previously letting two go.

A shot rang out in the building and it emerged that Davies had turned a gun on himself but he was not fatally wounded. He later stood trial alongside his two accomplices.

Davies was sentenced to 22 years while the others – Wesley Dick and Anthony Munroe – were jailed for 18 and 17 years respectively.

Today, the restaurant is an empty space within one of London’s prestigious postcodes, quietly sitting unused and surrounded by shops and whizzing traffic.

While motorists and shoppers passing by might be unaware of the location’s significance, its local residents and workers nearby keep the venue’s history alive.

‘I remember thinking that it was something that we only though happened in America with the armed cops on the rooftops,’ the concierge added.

‘No one really remembers it here, but it’s part of London’s history.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

Whether your sexual kink involves role play or something a little more unsavoury, like ‘cum walks’, the secret is about to be out.

The biggest sexual kinks for each UK city have been revealed after researchers trawled through Britain’s search history to expose just what get’s us going.

When it comes to Londoners, they’re pretty vanilla, but Leeds and Birmingham both seem to have a slightly unexpected fetish.

The study, conducted by porn site BabeStation, found the top search across the nation was ‘UK models’ when it came to pleasuring themselves, but when it looked at individual cities, there were some naughtier searches taking the crown.

Starting with the capital, Londoners get off on lesbian porn, with the most common search being for ‘girl on girl’ adult content.

It’s not all that surprising given that lesbian porn is also very popular with women, and it was the fourth most searched for category on Pornhub in 2024.

Londoners love getting down and dirty too, although not always responsibly, given the London borough of the City of Westminster has the highest rates of syphilis, gonorrhoea and genital warts per 100,000 people in the country.

In the south, Bristol was also fairly vanilla with ‘couples’ porn being the most searched for. But as we head to the midlands and further north, things start to head up a little.

Birmingham residents have been dipping their toes into some good old fashioned foot fetish content.

Sex therapist Aliyah Moore previously told Metro that food fetishes aren’t uncommon and that happy experiences with our feet early on in life can help shape this kink.

‘Chance sightings of bare feet, positive reinforcement during foot-related activities, or early sexual experiences involving feet could all have been factors,’ Aliyah said.

‘How the particular body part is portrayed in the media or how society views them might influence a person’s tastes and cause a foot fetish.’

A University of Bologna study found 47% percent of body part fetishists got off on feet content. Among those people preferring objects related to body parts, footwear (shoes, boots, etc.) was the second most popular, too. So if this is what floats your boat, you certainly aren’t alone.

Sheffield locals have a predisposition to MILFs, with searches for mother figures being extremely popular. It’s surprising that more cities don’t also share this as the most alluring kink, given its the second most searched for term on PornHub.

But just an hour up the road in Leeds, locals are looking for women who have aged like fine wine, with the most searched for term being ‘grannies’.

Interestingly, Golden Age content (featuring senior men and women) was the biggest sex trend of the year back in 2023, with mature porn becoming the second most popular category on PornHub.

It was also the fifth most popular category for women, while searches for the term granny jumped 132% that year.

‘The real surprise this year is that grannies have overtaken lesbians,’ a BabeStation spokesperson says. ‘It shows just how adventurous viewers are getting.’

New here? Sign up for the Hook Up newsletter

Hi, I’m Alice Giddings, Metro’s resident sex and relationships reporter.

If you love a juicy read, you’re in the right place. From steamy stories to expert bedroom tips, my weekly newsletter dishes out everything you need to know about sex, dating, and everything in between.

Expect real-life confessions, X-rated diaries, and sizzling advice from Metro’s trusted sexperts. Ready to spice up your inbox? Sign up here.

Liverpudlians have the opposite preference preferring ‘college’ porn with young men and women performing for the camera. It’s a preference that has come under scrutiny, ever since Bonnie Blue began selling content by taking university students’ virginities in Freshers week.

In Manchester, locals are adopting a more-the-merrier approach, with ‘threesome’ being the number one searched for term.

This was the 13th most popular term on Pornhub last year, with the allure of a third party seemingly never getting old.

So, do you share the same kink as the rest of your neighbours?

Do you have a story to share?

Get in touch by emailing MetroLifestyleTeam@Metro.co.uk.

When officers arrived at the home Dorothy ‘Cherry’ Groce on September 28 1985, her family weren’t expecting how much it would change London – and the UK – forever.

They were looking for her 21-year-old son Michael, believing he was connected to an armed robbery and was hiding out at the family home in Normandy Road, Brixton.

While she was in bed, and three of her six children were at home, officers, including one armed inspector, burst into the property, leaving the family terrified.

‘It was a loud noise that made me run down the stairs – by the time I got down there were three police dogs, police rushing everywhere and one of them had a gun,’ Cherry’s daughter said at the time.

During the aggressive confrontation, the armed officer shot Cherry, leaving her serious injuries. The 37-year-old was taken to hospital but later declared paralysed from the waist downwards.

As word of the shooting spread across south London, skirmishes broke out and escalated, leading to two days of protests and riots. Tensions were already high between members of the Black community and the police after a previous uprising in 1981.

During the 1985 riot, 43 civilians and ten police officers were left injured. Cars were burnt out, shops were set on fire, looting was reported. Photo journalist David Hodgson, who was taking a photograph of the scene when he was attacked, later died in hospital of an aneurysm.

While Brixton later returned to normality, the mental scars remained in the area for decades, and Cherry’s health never recovered. She later died in hospital in 2011 of kidney failure after suffering an infection.

Her youngest son, Lee, was just 11 when the police raided their home and shot his mother in front of him.

He said she had told officers ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t feel me legs’ after the gun was discharged.

After the death of George Floyd, who murdered by a white police officer in 2020 , the memories of what happened to Cherry came flooding back.

‘She would have been appalled at what happened to George Floyd,’ he told Metro. ‘It would have probably triggered trauma for her, especially as he said the same words as her – “I can’t breathe”.

‘I know she would want things to have been better and want us to have learnt from the past. She would probably be disappointed with how slow we’ve made progress but also want to acknowledge some of the progress that has been made regardless.’

After her death, Lee set up the Cherry Groce Foundation in 2014 to help those in the community whose voices have been unheard.

He fought for a full apology from the police for the shooting, after they initially gave her compensation but did not admit liability. The policeman who shot her, Inspector Douglas Lovelock, was charged with inflicting unlawful and malicious grievous bodily harm and later was acquitted.

Lee told Metro: ‘The uprisings in 1981 had a huge impact on the community, which I felt gave momentum to the second uprisings four years later.

‘In terms of what has changed since then, we had the Scarman report which highlighted the failures of police officers. Not everything was implemented by Lord Scarman’s recommendations, however, some things were, for instance, the Sus Law was scrapped.

‘Twenty years later, when the Macpherson report looked into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, many of the same recommendations were made all over again.’

The Sus Law, which was officially known as section 4 of the Vagrancy Act, allowed officers to stop anyone they thought was going to commit a crime. Met police officers disproportionately used them against the Black community, and they were finally scrapped in 1981.

In 2014, former Met Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe apologised for the wrongful shooting.

The acceptance of blame was prompted by an inquest which found that there were eight separate failings by the police during the raid and Cherry was unlawfully shot.

‘Could we see what happened in 1985 happen again? Yes, we could,’ Lee said. ‘The community will only take so much and we still haven’t fully healed from the wounds of the past so therefore it makes it very, very sensitive.

‘Any type of injustice, particularly against Black people, there is always a risk that we could have another uprising, and that it why it is so important we learn, we apply and hopefully transform.’

He urged young people channel their trauma into something positive.

‘Trauma is a real thing and has a real serious impact,’ he said. ‘Some hurt people hurt people, so therefore, I would like to say to the young Londoners, seek support and secondly in your attempt to heal from trauma find purpose.

Following her death, a memorial to Cherry was erected in Windrush Square, in the centre of Brixton, and a Blue Plaque was placed on the family’s former home.

Ridge Gunessee, 33, now lives at the house and told Metro he was ‘overwhelmed’ by its significance.

‘People come to pray outside sometimes and obviously being the 40th anniversary it’s really important to remember what happened,’ he said. ‘Things are a lot better around here now, but we should not forget.’

For Lee, his mother’s strength and positivity lives on in his mind, and remains a constant source of inspiration for him.

‘She never dealt with her ordeal with negativity; she tried to stay positive. My mum tried to be the best mother that she could within the position that she was in,’ he said.

‘I’ve taken on a lot of her values in terms of how I’ve dealt with this and I want what happened to my mum to stand for something.

‘I don’t want it to be in vain, and in order for that to happen I have to ensure that I do my bit to ensure that lessons are learned, implemented and that we see the benefits.’

The Colour of Injustice, by Lee Lawrence, is published by Abacus on October 2nd. His first book The Louder I will sing: A story of Racism, Riots and Injustice won the 2020 Costa Biography award.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.