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New figures say Leeds is one of the safest places in the UK and I want to know if they’ve ever actually been here

We politely disagree


An article recently published by the Yorkshire Evening Post

A new study into crime statistics claims Leeds is in the top 10 safest cities in the UK.

A Yorkshire Evening Post article about this revelation goes on to link to a news piece titled "The Leeds children aged three committing crimes in Leeds". Ironic for two reasons: It immediately negates the point made by the stufy and secondly, apparently using the word "Leeds" twice in the same sentence is NOT a criminal offence (I checked).

Despite the statistics of the study, let's ask some questions ourselves of the crimes us students deal with. What about sexual assault, for example, the crisis that's plagued Hyde Park for years to the point where people refuse to walk through there alone in the daylight because of incidents like this. Ahh but its okay though, at least now we know that there's only nine days of thunder a year. We can all sleep easy now.

Given that there's almost half a million people in Leeds and, according to this rigorous study, on average there's 1125 robberies I find that a bit strange, given that everyone knows somebody that's had their flat broken into or car stolen or bike nicked.

Maybe I'm being obtuse. Maybe I notice a higher rate of crime because I live in a student area, socialise with students, and we're easy targets. Or maybe somebody looked at some numbers on a screen and said "Yeah, Leeds is alright. Only 250 robberies, not bad that." Maybe they didn't notice that when you type "Hyde Park Leeds" into Google, the first autocomplete option that comes up is "crime".

It might not be the most dangerous place in the world, but it's far from safe.