The Met Engage system restricts you to one ward and you cannot discuss neighbouring wards, which strongly affects you and does not enable a bigger area overview. I have therefore taken to publishing Met Engage events in all 20 Tower Hamlets Wards on the social media accounts and the WhatsApp channel and sometimes even go beyond for neighbouring events like bike marking for example.

Met Police Met Engage does not link to this directly because I am using an independent system. The Met Engage use Neighbourhood Alert, who run a nationwide system that does not verify subscribers and their user numbers can be very high like in Greater Manchester of over 100,000, but their crime rate is actually higher than ours in London. See Met Engage

The story so far.

Since 2011, Tower Hamlets Police aimed to create a communication system, that includes residents and involves the community in Community Policing. In 2011 Tower Hamlets Police did not have a mailing list to communicate with residents.

Neighbourhood Watch Association

In 2011, a Neighbourhood Watch Association was created.

Safer Neighbourhood Officers would personally visit local residents and contract them as Neighbourhood Watch Coordinators.

Those contracts were then administered by me and kept in paper and on Spreadsheets.

There was no connection to any online membership system like Ourwatch.

In 1917, the then Commander Madam Sue Williams introduced OWL after the Neighbourhood Watch Association had dissolved after I left and after me, Andy Agar stopped doing this.

Police OWL was the first online mailing list system enabling residents to sign up to an interactive community engagement system. On OWL I was a fully police vetted community coordinator. Coordinators on Neighbourhood Watch on the Ourwatch platform are not police vetted, they are licensed by the National Neighbourhood Watch Network like with a commercial organisation, just that you are licensed as NW volunteer by Ourwatch but not the Met Police. On Met Engage, there are no community coordinators and you only get messages from Police Officers or Police staff. Police OWL was not used by all Greater London Boroughs and we got to see a limited number of messages from some boroughs.

See the link to the still existing site, which shows the tremendous amount of national awards the site received. It was very successful but still it was decided to close the site down on 31. October 2024 and remove the thousands of of residents details on file.

Met Engage

This highly advertised system, is connected to the national Neighbourhood Alert system. It stretches over the whole of Greater London and includes all areas with the exception of City of London.

Anybody registering will not be required to submit any proof of ID or address but anybody can add their details and is asked to submit survey submissions, despite not having to proof actual residency in the area.

Currently, both the Police as well as Tower Hamlets THEO officers recommend that people register with the new Met Engage.

I have compiled a page on how to contact Tower Hamlets Police via their main website and how to follow up on previous crime cases.

All officers allocated to a ward are listed but only one contact email address per ward is given for all officers. You are asked not to report time-sensitive matters to Met Engage and no crime can be reported there.

Met Police website

Other services available directly via the Met Police website are still available, which are not connected to the Met Engage service.

Connect to Tower Hamlets Police services either via our

• Safer Neighbourhoods Page
• Tower Hamlets Police site

You do NOT need to be subscribed to Met Engage to benefit from your

• SNT engagement sessions, which you can look up on your ward web page.
• Police live chat services.
• Report Crime online
• request a community contact session.

Problems I anticipate.

I have been involved with community engagement strategies from the beginning and saw the development and the problems.

With Police OWL, some Greater London teams using it were very busy on the system. Areas like Redbridge posted constantly.

In Tower Hamlets Police, the OWL system gradually fell obsolete, mainly for a lack of time of officers to write and distribute regular newsletters and engagement sessions. Police monitored the OWL system, but time constraints hindered continued communications. Tower Hamlets Council had access to OWL but rarely used it.

What happened with OWL and it’s the same with Met Engage is, that users are not being verified. Anybody can register anywhere without proof of residency.

METCC alone deals with 4 million reported cases per year. This figure does not include in person or Met Police website reported incidences nor the anonymous reports. The equivalent of Met Engage in Greater Manchester has over 100,000 subscribers. You can imagine how many emails officers have to read through daily.

Neighbourhood Watch

is now solely run via the national Ourwatch website, which does not in any way use police vetted coordinators in Tower Hamlets and police do not approve Neighbourhood Watch schemes. Unverified persons, without any proof of residency can make up an online Neighbourhood Watch community. Yet, Neighbourhood Watch advertises itself with window stickers and street signs. You may actually purchase those unchallenged.

We do NOT recommend Neighbourhood Watch, as systems that do not verify users. If you need only the occasional message from your local ward team, by all means, subscribe to Met Engage, but you can read all their messages online without subscribing. For me, it is beneficial that I can now read all team messages online and pass these on. I get a bigger readership reposting Met Engage online than Met Engage gets by posting only to their subscribers.

In inner London most people do not know their neighbours. In Tower Hamlets we have the highest percentage of Immigrants and constantly changing residencies in all areas.

Metropolitan Police did NOT widely consult on their proposals to use Met Engage via Neighbourhood Alert. The decision was centrally taken by the Mayor of London and MOPAC.

THEO’s Tower Hamlets Engagement Officers

are uniformed and equipped, earn more than a Metropolitan Police officer but have far less powers, even less than a PCSO. See the table of powers here.

Whilst areas like Cheshire dismiss PCSOs from their force at a rate of 70%, to save money and concentrate on crime fighting with fully qualified and empowered officers, Tower Hamlets goes the opposite direction. We see an increase in less powerful PCSOs and we see an increase in less powerful but highly paid THEO’s many are just available to Council Tenants, despite being financed by the general council tax revenue.

It would be good to have one central publication channel that publishes all without having to subscribe especially but collect input only via police verified crime and ASB reports. Plus ward panels also collect input from residents they know.