CRIMES IN LONDON.

Dunstan Times, Issue 1135, 1 February 1884, Page 3

CRIMES IN LONDON.

The Director of Criminal Investigations, in a recent report, said that London was tha safest city in the world for life and property. Three events which have happened during the past fortnight (says the Home N’-'ivu) set this daring assertion in a strange light. In the first case, Mr Sexton, M.P., was set upon by a gang of footpads in a street off the Strand, and a watch valued at £4O snatched from his pocket. It is true that this happened at 3 o’clock in the morning ; but the thieves showed their respect for the vigilance of the police by walk ng cooly away, and but for a cabman would have escaped altogether. That an outrage should be committed on a Land League member is perhaps only retributive justice, but oddly enough the culprit was Irish also. A couple of days after a German was kidnapped, at 8 o’clock in the evening, in the neighbourhood of Euston road, one of the most populous thoroughfares in the Metropolis. A sack was flung over his head, ho was dragged into a house, drugged, and robbed of about £BO which he had saved to get married. Ten or 12 hou'a after he was found lying on the highway of Hertford Common, about a dozen miles away, bound hand and foot. The following day a respectable girl was found lying half dead on the Thames foreshore, near Blackfriars, having been subjected to brutal treatment, and then thrown over the embankment. If, with the crimes of this sort of daily occurrence, London is the “ safest ” city in the world, the others cannot be desirable places of habitation.