Sadiq Khan has been accused of "victim blaming" over London's rising knife crime figures.
Conservative mayoral candidate Susan Hall claimed the London Mayor blamed the increase on a proliferation of "expensive mobile phones" in the capital.
In an Op Ed for GB News members, Hall said London is battling an "epidemic" of knife crime, but accused Khan of "ducking and diving to avoid responsibility".
According to figures from the Office for National Statistics, knife-enabled crimes in London to the end of June 2023 increased by 21 per cent.
Sadiq Khan has been accused of "victim blaming" over London's rising knife crime figures
PA
Hall said: "Sadiq Khan is playing his old tricks again, ducking and diving to avoid responsibility rather than taking ownership of the crisis he has allowed to happen. He’d rather virtue signal than act.
"You’d expect that after eight years at the top he’d have done something, produced and implemented a plan. But he hasn’t."
She claimed: "In a recent interview, Londoners sat aghast at the gumption of the Mayor on full display, when he blamed the surge in stabbings on mobile phones. For one, I was shocked! It looked like the interviewer was as well.
"And who can blame them – you just cannot make it up. According to Mayor Khan, the man in charge of the police in this City, those innocent gadgets in your pocket are practically asking to be stolen, leading to violent, and sometimes fatal, attacks.
"This is surely a new low, even for a mayor who has turned dodging responsibility into an art form.
"For Sadiq Khan, he’d rather we stopped buying phones, if it meant he had less work to do as Mayor.
"He seems to be under the delusion that if your phone wasn’t so attractive, it wouldn’t be so tempting to steal it.
"Sound familiar? That's because it is. It’s victim blaming, plain and simple."
The London mayoral candidate added: "That might be Mayor Khan’s perverse logic. It sure as hell isn’t mine."
In an interview with Sky on New Years Eve, Khan suggested the "temptation" to steal a mobile phone is one of the drivers of knife crime.
He said: "The biggest personal robbery is of mobile phones. Twenty or 30 years ago car manufacturers managed to reduce the theft of car stereos, reduce the thefts of Tom Toms from cars by designing away the possibility of doing so."
When the presenter pointed out that his question was about the prevalence of knives in robberies, Khan responded: "That's because they try to steal the mobile phones.
"So if you can make a second-hand phone useless to a robber or a thief that means the temptation to do so is going away.
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS:
"Enforcement's really important so we're using data now to make sure we have police officers targeting those parts of our city which we know are, in inverted commas, hotspots.
“So it’s a combination of using data to target the hotspots, town centres transport hubs, but also working with the mobile phone manufacturers and the platforms to make sure there is no resale value of a phone."
The London Mayor's Office has been contacted for comment.
