Daily Mail criticised for falsely portraying Cardiff as a crime hot-spot

Martin Shipton

The Daily Mail has been criticised after portraying Cardiff as a crime-ridden city where violence is commonplace.

In a double-page spread, the right-wing English paper states: “In modern-day Cardiff, gun-toting drug gangs are terrifyingly commonplace”.

In fact, official statistics show that the incidence of gun crime in the Welsh capital is very low, on a par with or less than that in many English cities.

The Mail article cites a number of crimes that have been reported following court cases, and purports to claim that they form part of a pattern.

It states: “Cathays, a district just north of the city centre, topped the ‘most dangerous’ list in a study of crime rates examining the areas around the country’s 160 universities and higher education colleges.

“Each year, a staggering 32.5 crimes per 100 residents occur there , the study found. And of the 6,495 crimes committed there in the past 12 months, almost a third (31%) were categorised as either violent or sexual. The mostly middle-class students who inhabit the area are, needless to say, not to blame. Instead they tend to be victims, acting as a sort of magnet drawing criminals in from the city’s outer suburbs.

“Those who spoke to the Mail this week reported routinely witnessing sexual assaults, street robberies and drug dealers going about their business in broad daylight. One, a final-year student called Olivia, said she had been the victim of sexual assaults twice in the past three years.

“The first was in a bar, which has since closed, on a busy Saturday night, where a man pushed himself up behind her and groped her. The second occurred as she walked home alone after a night out. It was dark and late, but I hadn’t got enough money for an Uber and my shared house was just round the corner,’ she recalled. ‘Halfway home two guys pulled up ahead of me in a car and as I drew level they jumped out and pushed me down an alleyway. They got hold of me and one of them had his hands on my breast. I managed to get one of my arms free and land a heavy punch to his throat. He let go of me immediately and I used a couple of seconds that bought me to run.’

Horrible as such incidents are, however, official statistics show that Cardiff is not an outlier in terms of crime. It has less crime than Newcastle or Leicester and is on as par with Sheffield. The only excessive kind of crime is bicycle theft.

City centre

The Cathays ward covers Cardiff city centre, not just the nearby district known by that name.

A Labour source said: “I’m genuinely sorry for anyone who has experienced crime in Cardiff , every incident has a real human impact, and those affected deserve empathy and support. At the same time, it’s important to remember that these individual cases do not represent the city as a whole.

“Cardiff remains one of the safer major cities in the UK, with crime trends that are improving, not worsening.

“Recent official data shows that overall crime in Cardiff has actually decreased by 5.1% year‑on‑year, with the city maintaining a Safety Score of 76/100, a strong rating for a major UK capital. While Cardiff faces the same challenges as any busy city, the evidence clearly shows that it is not gang‑run, nor is it a “no‑go zone.”

“Cathays ward contains a city centre that is visited by tens of thousands of people every weekend, so quite clearly it isn’t a no go zone.

“The Daily Mail is seeking to paint a picture ahead of the Senedd elections and has zero interest in Cardiff or its residents.”

Skewed

One comment beneath the article stated: “Clearly the person who wrote this article knows nothing about Cardiff or how the city’s areas fit together. The area of Cathays includes all of the city centre not just the area where students live.

“That isn’t the case in many other University towns where students live further away from the centre. This means that the crime figures referred to are completely skewed by incidents taking place in city centre bars etc. The fact that Cardiff has a very high “stay on” rate after students graduate would suggest that crime isn’t anywhere nearly as bad in the University residential areas as the article outlines.”