I am not posting because trump tweeted something (I stopped reading about him 3 weeks ago and have been feeling much better since). I am posting because of comments made by the Brexiters - right wing talk - on this board in the past year or so to the effect that Muslim immigrants increase the crime rate of the UK.

trump wrote "United Kingdom crime rises 13% annually amid spread of Radical Islamic terror." His source? The author of the article presumes that trump might have seen one of his own previous tweets somewhere, liked it, and quoted it... :o)

But fun apart, here are the facts about an increase of violent crimes in the UK: It is unrelated to terrorism and it is not increasing:

The 13 percent increase comes from a report released on Thursday by the Office for National Statistics in the United Kingdom.

“The simple answer,” a spokesman told us by phone, “is that our statistical release bulletin yesterday made no link between terrorism and violent crime.”

Sex crime was un-reported before, so it looks higher now, but only because it is now better reported:

Those improvements in recording crime are one reason that the number of sex crimes has increased, up 19 percent year-over-year.

The number of homicides actually fell 2 percent, year over year — a fall which, weirdly, is due to a mass casualty incident in 1989. The U.K. counts a homicide in the year in which it was identified as a homicide, not the year in which the death occurred. A number of deaths related to a stampede at a soccer game in Hillsborough that occurred nearly 30 years ago were first counted in the 2016 tally, so the 2 percent drop year-over-year in the new data is a drop compared to the deaths in 2016 plus the Hillsborough count. If you exclude Hillsborough from the 2016 totals and the deaths in terror attacks in London and Manchester, the number of homicides increased 8 percent.


The biggest increases were in stalking and harassment and robbery. The increase in the number of crimes labeled “violence with injury” was up 10 percent — the increase in those labeled “violence without injury” was up 21 percent. This doesn’t seem like a crisis driven by international terrorism.

So let's call the talk against Muslims the way it is: Right wing talk.