Met Engage is provided by Neighbourhood Alert and used in various forms throughout Great Britain. It is not a magic bullet to reduce crime.
Media has released information about policing
- London has lost more than 3,000 police officers in just three years
- The Metropolitan Police currently has just over 31,100 officers patrolling the capital.
- That is roughly 400 fewer than when Sadiq Khan took office a decade ago.
- It is also a massive drop from the 34,500 officers London had back in April 2023.
- Experts say the force actually needs 38,000 officers to properly handle the scale and complexity of crime in a city of nine million people. source MyLondon
Met Engage rollout in London, coincided with a close down and/or reduction of opening hours of police stations.
Lets make it clear, Met Engage is not the Met Police website. It is totally separate. If you report crime or ASB or anything else on the Met Police website, it gets channelled into data that can be included in London’s crime statistics, anything you put into Met Engage does not.
Met Engage messages are very time-consuming to read for officers. People just write long emails, stories, which can include anything from barking dogs, drug dealing, damaged entry-door systems, theft, loud noises, broken heating, blocked rubbish chutes etc.
A local officers, usually a PCSO has to read through these messages. There is no restraint on amount of messages you can send or what you put into it. Some people send long emails daily, whilst others write off and on. Recent reports told us that local SNT officers only spend 18% of their time patrolling our streets, which is where we need them.
Arriving in the local SNT Met Engage mail inbox is a salad of grievances. It’s not on a secure Met Police database, it’s on a system run by Visav.
Compare this to reporting on the Met Police website. You get channelled into a reporting stream, sorted by crime. You fill in boxes and that gets sent to a dedicated crime team who can read your submission, which has been given a Met Police contact reference number, this can be a CAD or other contact reference. Your submission is kept on a secure police database.
Met Engage is better for reading messages all over Greater London than OWL was but you need a lot of time to do it. Hence I publish all Met Engage messages important to Tower Hamlets on the social media. See links below.
- I have 18 years community crime fighting experience without Met Engage.
- See the urgent safety warning
- People are complaining that police are not patrolling but sending messages on Met Engage
- People are too busy working to read MET Engage emails
Greater Manchester started using it in 2023 and has a big sign-up rate, for the Alert platform in excess of 100,000, here called Met Engage.
Overall Rate: Greater Manchester’s rate (108.2 per 1,000) is slightly higher than London’s (107 per 1,000)—a difference of about 1.2 offences per 1,000 residents. This makes Manchester marginally less safe on a per capita basis, though both are above the England and Wales average of ~85 per 1,000.
Other comparisons:
use of Neighbourhood Alert (NA)
In Scotland 35.000 people signed up
The crime rate = 1.200 per 10,000 population
National crime rate 545 per 10,000
In Greater Manchester 100,000 signed up to NA
Crime rate = 114 crimes per 1,000
Crime rate for England and Wales = 83 per 1.000
In Greater London just implementing NA
Crime rate = 106.4 crimes per 1,000
Tower Hamlets Crime Watch are very cautious about reporting via Met Engage. NOT advised.
If you search Grok, they describe it in glowing colours as if it’s a magic solution to all your problems. It’s not
Despite these higher crime rates in Greater Manchester, Met Police has just released a glowing recommendation for using Met Engage with a promotion video, filmed in Bethnal Green, encouraging reporting via Met Engage.
I thank the officers for patrolling and caring for local business safety.
See my analysis of the current Community engagement situation.
I do NOT recommend that you send emails to local officers via Met Engage as the sheer amount will drown local officers in information. The information you send via Met Engage will NOT be logged automatically in the police systems and they do not use AI to filter out content and do NOT follow up all emails. Imagine the sheer deluge from over 100,000 users.
Why sign up?
Why indeed. I am local and deliver local social media, know what people want.
My comments
Any communications you send / receive to / from Met Engage are NOT stored on secure Metropolitan Police servers. Neighbourhood Alert had a huge data loss.
Met Engage is run by the same platform Neighbourhood Alert, which runs Community Engagement platforms all over the United Kingdom. Neighbourhood Alert’s system has about 1.7 million subscribers nationwide for various providers. I can get that many viewers with a good social media post.
What to expect when you sign up
The platform recognises your location from your IP address and knows your locality when you first sign up.
There are no checks for Personal Identification or proof of actual address. You can choose from a list of street addresses, manually enter any address and give a name as you wish and use any email address. The only verification is a code sent to your email address used, which you have to input into some boxes.
Once you signed up, you have choices of getting communications translated, which is user friendly. There is also a survey waiting for you and you are directly added to your SNT ward. Makes no sense to collect surveys from people who are not verified as living there.
But why sign up with Met Engage when you can talk to police directly and contact your ward panel chair with your concern?
Look at this website’s free courses page and find courses to do when it suits you.
Options
The platform offers you to connect to
- ReportFraud – send useful fraud prevention advice. You can subscribe to ReportFraud directly via their website. download free resources
- Get SafeOnline – you can subscribe to Get safe online directly here
- Police UK – never received one email through this channel in years. But you can download the Police app, see the apps page
- Neighbourhood Watch (I do not recommend) you do not want to share a platform with unverified people who may not even live in Tower Hamlets but can see your name and location if you join a scheme. The X platform now states, which country a registrant and platform actually is, but Neighbourhood Alert, Met Engage, Neighbourhood Watch do not disclose this information. Anybody from anywhere can register at an UK address on their system.
Recommendations
Information providers see the portals page
As it happens, you cannot just register with Met Engage without registering with at least one other service. I have removed myself from the platform. I read the publications online without being registered.
You can still email your local SNT team directly by visiting the Met Police website for your local address and choose contact form to email them directly without using Met Engage.
I have completely cancelled my Met Engage registration as it is just another layer of extra work for me.
Contact your SNT officers
To to the Safer Neighbourhoods Page with direct links to the local Ward Met Engage messages and to your local secure Metropolitan Police website. Click a team as shown above and choose an option from the drop down list.
concerns
See my analysis of the current Community engagement situation.
I’ve sent an email to Tower Hamlets Police, outlining my concerns. A formal complaint has been lodged with Met Police over data concerns.
Find what you need
- Go to the Safer Neighbourhoods page
- Scroll to your ward
- Choose Met Engage for sessions
- Visit Met Police website to contact your team
When looking at Grok, they say contradicting information, crediting Met Engage for reduced crime rates but admitting that no data from Met Engage gets stored on Met Police servers. How is that possible?
I will state that Met Engage is a good place to be for people who only want to get notifications for their local small ward area and who do not use other variety of sources for information or find navigating the Internet difficult.
