Where is London's worst area for knife crime?

0:02Hi, I'm Charlie Duffield and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. If you're new here, hit follow and give us a rating. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. Coming up later in the show, the Channel 4 documentary about adult content creator Bonnie Blue is here. But does it reveal any genuine insights about the star's jaw-dropping life? People are fascinated by her. There's nothing people love to hate on more than a woman who transgresses social norms and is unapologetic about it. especially if that woman is in sex work and clearly loves it. That's kind of something we like to look down on a lot, coupled with all the extreme stunt she's doing.

0:45There is a big public fascination with that. Like, who is this person? Why does she do it?

0:56But first, knife crime in London has surged by 58 % in three years, according to a new report from the Policy Exchange think tank which reveals the extent of the crime epidemic plaguing the capital. Just one in 20 muggings were solved last year by the Met Police and only one in 170 snatch thefts, such as watches or phones that were stolen on the street. The report also claimed that offenders were being let off the hook with more than 4 ,500 prolific offenders walking free from court last year. However, a spokesperson for the Mayor of London said that the latest ONS stats show that overall the violent crime with injury rate is lower in London than in the rest of England and Wales.

1:43But former Metropolitan Police Detective Chief Inspector David Spencer said London is in the grip of a knife crime, robbery and theft epidemic. And he joins me now. David, tell me more about this report. Policy Change have looked at street crime in London, in the capital. And one of the things that we've been looking at is just how that's changed over recent years. Try and understand what we think that police, government and city hall should be doing about it. Some of the sort of key findings that we've got. So first of all, knife crime in the capital in London has increased by about 86 % over the last decade.

2:21And last year, there were over 16 ,000 knife crime offences in London. which is the highest ever on record, over 60 % of them are robberies. And a substantial number of them are mobile phones that are trying to be stolen. The other thing that we found is that actually vast swathes of London are pretty safe. There is very little knife crime in most of the capital. But actually, where there is knife crime, it's highly geographically concentrated. So what we found was that 15 % of neighbourhoods and the way that we broke things down is using a measure called lower layer super output areas, which are sort of areas of about 20 to 30 streets.

3:03But 15 % of those neighbourhoods account for half of all knife crime in London. So it's really geographically concentrated. And which neighbourhoods are most badly impacted? The most interesting neighbourhood is probably the one with the highest number of knife crime incident. That's a neighbourhood in London's West End around Oxford Circus. So around Oxford Street, Oxford Circus, Regent Street, Piccadilly Circus. And year on year, it's not just one year, but there's been a few years in a row where this part of London has been the peak for knife crime. In 2023, there were over 130 incidents. In 2024, over 108 incidents.

3:41And it's particularly a robbery hotspot. So that's what we're seeing is going on. But in the report, we list 20 of the sort of top neighbourhoods for knife crime. But year in, year out, what we see is this part of central London is the real epicentre of what's happening in terms of knife crime. What do you classify as knife crime? This is where someone uses a knife or threatens a knife and commits another crime. Everything from a serious as a murder through to rape or sexual assault. It could be robbery, a threat to kill. So what action needs to be taken? One of the things that we look at in particular is rates of stop and search over the last decade when you compare that to the levels of knife crime.

4:25And it isn't just us that have looked at this. Actually, Cambridge academics, so one of the most preeminent criminologists in the world at the moment, a guy called Larry Sherman, has looked at this as well. And what he found was that essentially the more stop and search you do, the less knife crime there's going to be. And they examined 15 years worth of data comparing 58 ,000 knife crime offences and 4.3 million stop and searches. And they did a really detailed statistical analysis. And what we've seen in London is that the number of stop and searches over recent years have plummeted. And what we've seen at the same time is the number of knife crime incidents going up.

5:05And those two things seem to be linked. And so therefore, as Steve Watson, who's the Chief Consul of Greater Manchester, said recently, if you don't back your officers to do stop and search, they will stop doing stop and search. And if you stop doing stop and search, you will see street robberies increase. And that's what's happening. Stop and search tactics are often said to be racist. What do you say to that? Stop and search has to be done in a professional way by police officers. And I went out a couple of years ago with Metamont police officers actually in Oxford Circus from the Territorial Support Group.

5:37And I saw them doing quite a lot of stop and search. But every single thing I saw them do was highly professional and really effective. But that's really important. Police officers have to be professional when they're doing stop and search. But the reality is we can't be coy about what crime looks like and what is happening in the capital. So 13.5 % of Londoners are black. But when we start to break down what crime looks like, 48 % of robbery suspects between 2018 and 2023 were described as black by the victims. 43.5 % of those charged with murder in London between 2003 and February 2024 were black.

6:15And actually, most tragically, 45.6 % of non-domestic knife crime murder victims in the 20 years between 2003 and 2024 were black. And we cannot ignore the facts of what is going on our streets. And if we were to simply say, well, actually, what would be OK is if police only stopped and searched proportionate to the resident population, the 13.5 % of London's who are black, then we would simply be ignoring the reality of crime in our capital city. And I don't think any of us want to see that because the results of it are time and again, year after year, what we see, which is more young black men being stabbed on our streets.

6:59So what else can be done? We make 17 recommendations across a whole range of areas. One of the areas where the Metamont police have been really effective, actually, is their use of live facial recognition systems. And they've really led the way in the development of this process. and what over the last couple of years when they've deployed it they've managed to arrest well over now a thousand people suspected of all sorts of crimes including sexual offenses, violence against women and girls, burglaries, all sorts of criminality and one of the interesting things is that was subject to a really robust evaluation by the London, by the National Physical Laboratory and they found that when live facial recognition was deployed in the way that the police do it, there was no false positive disparities for black individuals or other ethnic minorities.

7:51So it can be a really effective targeted system and tactic for the police to use, particularly in these sort of knife crime hotspots that we're talking about. Finally, do you have anything else to add? It can't be the police alone that tackle these problems. The criminal justice system as a whole has a huge role to play. And one of the things that we highlight there is how the most prolific offenders are dealt with. And what's really shocking is that when we look at people who've got over, say, 45 criminal convictions on their record, when they're convicted of another offence, so on number 46, they are still not less likely to get a prison sentence.

8:33So in over half of cases, the most prolific offenders who've already got 45 criminal convictions walk free without going to prison. And we say that's really problematic because what we're doing is taking these most prolific offenders, the police catch them, they put them through the criminal justice system and they go straight back out on the streets to continue committing offences. And we say that's really problematic. Let's go to a break. Coming up in part two, what happens when you weaponise your sexuality for the algorithm? We'll see you back here in just a moment.

9:14Welcome back. Now, whether you call her a sexfluencer, content creator, social media star, sex worker, or something else entirely, Bonnie Blue is a name that makes the headlines. The 26-year-old is somewhat of a spectacle. After having sex with more than 1 ,000 men in a single day, she was catapulted into notoriety. Her last sex stunt, catchily named Bonnie Blue's Petting Zoo was designed to be outrageous. The plan was for her to get tied up in a glass box in central London and invite men to use her how they saw fit. Then her OnlyFans account was deactivated for breaching their content guidelines.

9:54Now she's starred in a Channel 4 documentary titled 1000 Men and Me, The Bonnie Blue Story, which promises to get to the bottom of whether her marathon sex sessions are exploitative or empowering. But does it succeed? Here's the trailer.

10:12It's a genius business model. Controversy gets exposure. Wait, you guys make me nervous. But it also could read as a non-consensual image. Do you know what I mean? Yes and no. Like, I'm fully clothed. Every single guy in there is fully clothed. That could just be a birthday party. And then who's getting... Only ways are comfortable. Don't just say it because everyone's here. I'm watching it. Who's over 18? Yeah, everybody's over 18, just checking. Oh, you look younger. That's why they got you in. Yeah. My next one is Bonnie Blue's petting zoo. What the hell is that? If she's looking at that, might she feel she, that's part of what she needs to offer, guys?

10:53The content I love making the most is the barely legals, the students, the husbands. Last I went out by myself was probably about six months ago. If you could earn a million pounds in a month, your morals would soon change and you'd get your bits out. This is number one of the... I found my purpose in... found the niche I want to focus on. To find out more, I chatted to Vicky Jessup, the Standards Commissioning Editor and Culture Writer. Vicky, who is Bonnie Blue and why is she such a controversial figure? Bonnie Blue is an adult content creator. She was born Tia Billinger. She grew up in Derby.

11:33and she originally worked in sales. I think she was very good at her job by all accounts and then got bored of it. I think she says in this new documentary that she kind of thought, I want something more. She worked as a cam girl. She worked as a sex worker. And then she went on to OnlyFans, which is this subscriber based platform where people can pay content creators for any kind of content, but usually it's quite sexual content. She kind of worked her way up there. She grafted and she became one of the biggest creators on the platform. So I'd say she's controversial probably because of her usp which is sleeping with quote-unquote barely legal young boys a lot of her stunts and her videos that have done very well on only fans involve her kind of rocking up at universities or similar and seeing how many young men she can sleep with so that's kind of how she made her name on only fans now there have been a sex stunt that has rocketed her into the mainstream media the one that people are probably most aware of is the one where she slept or claimed to sleep with a thousand men in 24 hours.

12:33So to say she's divisive is probably an understatement. Why was she banned from OnlyFans? She has made a career out of sleeping with people that are not specials in any sense. She says that people can see themselves in the shoes of the men who are having sex with her, essentially. She's doing these quite extreme stunts and OnlyFans are pushing back and saying, no, you can't put this on our site. So it's her basically, I guess, trying to work around the quote unquote limitations that they're imposing on her. Eventually she was banned from OnlyFans in June, which the documentary does cover as well, basically due to a breach of terms after her extreme challenge content crossed the line.

13:09The stunt where she sleeps with a thousand men, that was not allowed to be broadcast on OnlyFans because it doesn't involve content creators. It involves, again, like amateur people, people off the street. So what do we learn about her in this documentary? The documentary doesn't really dive too deeply into who she is as a person, I would say. Clearly she's a very astute businesswoman. She clearly loves making money. She repeatedly says over the course of the documentary that the reason she's doing this is because she loves what she does. She reiterates like she doesn't have any hidden trauma.

13:38She doesn't have any PTSD. That's not the reason she's doing this. She says often that she just really loves having sex. She loves what she does and she clearly loves the lifestyle that this gives her. She says, I'm a millionaire. I get to do all this amazing travel. I guess why would I not want to do this? And I get to have a lot of sex and it's working for her. What do you make of her recent decision to work with Andrew Tate? I'm not a fan. A lot of the time she pushes back against accusations, maybe that she's damaging the way that young people look at sex. For some young men, she's their first experience of sex.

14:12She likes to have sex with virgins. And I think that's obviously not a healthy first experience to have. And for young women, again, it's not really giving them healthy attitudes towards how they should act once they start having sex or if they want to. she kind of dismisses all of that which is fine but i think andrew tate when you're aligning yourself with someone that's so clearly anti-women and misogynistic and has all these like horrendous accusations made against him then you probably should be maybe looking at your own image she calls him a marketing genius in the documentary she says he's probably just as controversial as i am we're both very misunderstood she's clearly doing this for like a business reasons.

14:51So she says she switches to using this new content platform called Fansly and she's like, I'll get a billion views from this Andrew Tate interview, which I would then use to promote myself. She's launched on Fansly now and I think at the end of the documentary it says that she expects to be back up to her OnlyFans earnings within a few months. So yes, it's worked for her, but I guess at what cost? And was there anything that surprised you? She cuts quite a lonely figure to be honest. She's very adamant, like I said before, that she loves what she does, but it clearly has come at a cost throughout the show.

15:20We never see any of her friends. We see her hang out with her family. She's put them all on the payroll, which is very nice for them. But we only really see her interacting with her family and with her team. And by the end of the episode, we see her in London. We see her doing jigsaws with her team and basically saying, I don't really go out by myself anymore. I'm scared of being attacked. I get a lot of death threats. I'm scared of acid attacks. When she's not performing and when she's not online and when she's not doing these stunts, I think she does seem quite isolated, which is interesting and something I really would have liked the documentary to dive into a bit more, to be honest, because it shows quite a vulnerable side that we don't really see much more of.

16:01And that's The Standard. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. If you'd like to get in touch, please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk. we'll be back here tomorrow at 5pm we'll see you then