Policing/crime

Hate crime in Waltham Forest update: LBWF and the police still treat it as a key priority, but the facts don’t support them

October 15, 2025 Policing/crime

In February 2023, a post on this blog examined hate crime in Waltham Forest, and queried why LBWF and the local police force was treating it as a key priority, worthy of enhanced financial and administrative support (see links, below). What follows looks at what has happened subsequently. Hate crime has continued to be prioritised. But are the doubts of earlier years also still present? First, a summary of the basic evidence. The only comprehensive series about hate crime is data collected by the police, and for the period February 2023 to September 2025 for Waltham Forest this reveals the fol... »

LBWF’s Violence Reduction Partnership aims to reduce knife crime, but after 5 years, £6.6m. of funding, and only disappointing results, it urgently needs a re-think

December 13, 2024 Policing/crime

In the middle years of the 2010s, there was escalating public disquiet in Waltham Forest about violent crime, particularly knife crime involving local youth, with newspaper reports focusing on both the volume of offences and the fact that the only a small number of perpetrators were being prosecuted (see links, below).  Accordingly, in November 2018, and largely as a response, LBWF launched a Violence Reduction Partnership (VRP), comprising its own staff and representatives of the police, schools, the heath service, the voluntary sector, businesses and the wider community, in order ‘to tackle ... »

A new study shows that the closure of police stations in Waltham Forest likely was a false economy, and may have actually aggravated criminality

May 2, 2024 Policing/crime

From 2011 onwards, Waltham Forest saw police stations in Leyton, Leytonstone, and Walthamstow close, leaving only Chingford open. There was much disquiet about this at the time, but senior police officers and their allies assured residents that money would be saved without any discernible impact on policing or criminality. Now a paper by Dr. Elisa Facchetti of the Institute of Fiscal Studies suggests that the proponents of closure were almost certainly wrong. Dr. Faccetti focuses on London as a whole in the period 2011-16, when the number of open police stations declined by 50 per cent, a... »

Local faith in the police plummets to levels lower than elsewhere in London. Why? Probably because too few criminals are being caught!

June 19, 2023 Policing/crime

It is a striking, though often overlooked fact, that Waltham Forest residents’ trust and confidence in the police has not only declined markedly over recent years, but is also comparatively less favourable than in most other London boroughs. What follows looks at the dimensions of this unsatisfactory situation, and then turns to  discuss its possible causes. Local trust and confidence in the police: the facts Each year, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) runs large-scale surveys to measure six metrics about how samples of the public assess the police, borough by boroug... »

Who’d have guessed it? A senior policeman talks nonsense about hate crime at a LBWF Scrutiny Committee meeting, and councillors remain silent

May 9, 2023 Policing/crime

A previous post (see link below) expressed disquiet about the fact that both LBWF and the local Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) have been pursuing hate crime in the borough as a priority, even though the evidence shows it is a small-scale phenomenon that doesn’t much worry residents. What follows is written in similar vein, and suggests that not only have LBWF and the police failed to properly monitor what they are doing about hate crime, but they also seem to be remarkably ill-informed about aspects of the law. The story is as follows. At a meeting of the LBWF Communities Scrutiny Committee... »

Hate crime in Waltham Forest: setting aside the scary rhetoric, is it as bad as LBWF claims?

February 13, 2023 Policing/crime

Introduction In the last few years, LBWF has regularly asserted that Waltham Forest is afflicted by ‘an unprecedented rise’ in damaging hate crime – especially, according to senior councillors, racist, Islamophobic, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and transgender hate crime.  As a response, and leading on from a specially convened Citizen’s Assembly, it has put in place various high-profile awareness, intervention, and training programmes, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds. With the Town Hall’s example before it, the local police force has followed suit, employing a dedicated hate crime o... »

Crime up, police sanction detections down, yet the LBWF Safer Neighbourhoods Board hasn’t met since November 2021

September 12, 2022 Policing/crime

In the 12 months ending August 2022, crime in Waltham Forest rose 1.9 per cent, while sanction detections (charges, summonses, cautions reprimands, final warning, etc.) fell by the same amount. Turning to the most common crime in the borough, violence against the person, there were 6,710 offences in 2021-22, 2.3 per cent down on the previous year, which seems a plus, though one that is considerably diminished by the fact that sanction detections had also declined, and by a whopping 13.4 per cent. Meanwhile research released in October 2021 revealed that almost two thirds of residents repo... »

Can the ordinary resident get justice in Waltham Forest?

March 14, 2022 Policing/crime

Some may judge the question posed in the title of this post as superfluous, with the answer so obviously ‘yes’ that it’s not worthy of further consideration. But consider these two case studies. Case One – Mr. A For some years, Mr. A has lived in a flat at a LBWF sheltered housing block.  In March 2021, he answered a knock on his door, and was confronted by a tradesman who claimed to be from a partner company which LBWF employs to carry out maintenance and repairs. The tradesman wanted to come into the flat, but was not wearing a face mask and had no ID.  Mr. A was wary on both ... »

Crime and policing latest: the Waltham Forest Safer Neighbourhood Board hits the skids again, and now LBWF – controversially – wants to disband it

October 5, 2021 Gang Prevention Programme, LBWF spin, Policing/crime

The Waltham Forest Safer Neighbourhood Board (WFSNB) brings together councillors and residents, and is a potentially very important component of the local fight against crime, supported, as it is, by LBWF, the Metropolitan Police Service,  and the Mayor’s Office for Policing And Crime (MOPAC), and charged with ‘bringing police and communities together to decide local policing and crime priorities, solve problems collaboratively and make sure that the public are involved in a wide range of other community safety decisions’. However, five years ago, when this blog last looke... »

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Waltham Forest’s Safer Neighbourhoods Board and MOPAC funding: the scandal continues

February 16, 2018 Gang Prevention Programme, LBWF spin, Policing/crime

A post of September past (see link below) reported that, though in FYs 2015-16 and 2016-17 the Waltham Forest Safer Neighbourhood Board (WFSNB) had been allotted £78,000 of Mayor’s Officer for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) funding, and promised to rigorously track how this was spent, it had so far failed to submit anywhere near the required number of monitoring reports. Now it has just emerged that nearly five months down the line, this regrettable situation persists, with MOPAC admitting that the WFSNB’s end of year monitoring forms for 2015-16, plus the mid-year and end of year monitoring... »

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