Not even close, unless you own a shop (in which case, in some areas, life can undeniably be exasperating and miserable). The vast majority of high street crimes are shoplifting and an astonishingly large number are attributed to a tiny, tiny number of people.
There are high crime areas in most towns in the UK where you will feel pretty safe, because the crime is simply not directed at you.
When it does spill over into personal violence, it is the aforementioned handful of people with drug problems. It’s worth noting that one incident involving three people is likely to result in a dozen recorded crimes. And a British town of sixty thousand people will have so few of these prolific individuals that they themselves commute to neighbouring towns to steal.
The crime is there, can be absolutely overwhelming and police does absolute f*k all about it (after the robbery they didn't even bothered to shop up, I was told over by phone to collect the evidence myself and bring it to the police because "we are solving these crimes from the office" by the investigating officer. They didn't solve that one).
That sounds like something that would be extremely easy to fix!
For one thing, it’s a revolving cast of a few dozen people at any one time (people do go to prison, get rehabilitated, move on or get moved on). For another, they are often vulnerable or exploited: a lot of shoplifting is done to order, to supply the black market.
The UK does need to take shoplifting more seriously, but it’s important to understand that it is a consequence of both the design of retail (self-checkout and fewer staff) and of the cost of living.
What is unjust, though, is to be the victim of criminals who benefit from knowing exactly what the threshold is to not being removed from society.
Silly fake faux-old-testament solutions like this don't actually work, as is demonstrated by the fact that most crime has fallen faster since they were abandoned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
It sounds like a very rough place, with very incompetent police.
Zero info on who the government hundreds of millions is going towards to help the problem (let me guess: a bunch of nonprofits who won't solve the problem).