Met Engage is provided by Neighbourhood Alert and used in various forms throughout Great Britain. It is not a magic bullet to reduce crime, as Met Police tries to portray it.

• We 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

See also our December ’25 newsletter.

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

Met Engage is a lazy solution for police to use, saving direct contact with people.
Tower Hamlets Crime Watch are very cautious about reporting via Met Engage. We do NOT advise it.

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.

We thank the officers for patrolling and caring for local business safety.

See my analysis of the current Community engagement situation.

We 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. We are local organisation and we deliver local services, we are local, we know what people want. Our website has never been hacked.

We have written to the Commissioner of the Police who replied to us on 28. October 2025.

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Our 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 1.5 million subscribers nationwide for various providers.

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 sing up with Met Engage when you can talk to police directly and contact your ward panel chair with your concern?

Look at our website free courses page and find courses to do when it suits you.

Options

The platform offers you to connect to

1. ReportFraud – send useful fraud prevention advice. You can subscribe to ReportFraud directly via their website. download free resources
2. Get SafeOnline – you can subscribe to Get safe online directly here
3. Polie UK – never received one email through this channel in years. But you can download the Police app, see our apps page
4. Neighbourhood Watch (we 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. All our members are verified Tower Hamlets residents.

Recommendations

Information providers see our portals page

As it happens, you cannot just register with Met Engage without registering with at least one other service. We have simply removed ourselves from the platform.

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.

We have completely cancelled our Met Engage registration as it is just another layer of extra work for us and our local officers.

Contact your SNT officers

But why use Met Engage when you can use the secure Metropolitan Police website instead? Click a team as shown above and choose an option from the drop down list.

Reports

We have contacted Detective Superintendent Oliver Richter and requested that our officers respond to local crime concerns.

Our concerns

See my analysis of the current Community engagement situation.

We’ve sent an email to Tower Hamlets Police, outlining our concerns. A formal complaint has been lodged with Met Police over data concerns.

Find what you need

1. Go to our Safer Neighbourhoods page
2. Scroll to your ward
3. Visit website
4. Select events
5. Or contact your team
   • At least here you get a police reference, why use Met Engage, which has been hacked previously.

Membership in Tower Hamlets Crime Watch

in contrast to Neighbourhood Watch we ask you to jump through a few more hoops before we accept you. Join here

Your membership will help increase our influence on policy making and questioning effectiveness of both Police and Council strategy. We look beyond and employ proper public scrutiny. It’s perhaps because we are NOT police or council funded that we need your support.

1. We ask for a joining fee
2. We check your ID
3. We check your address
4. We ask for completion of an Anti-terrorism course from ACT and/or willingness of volunteering with a major service.

We truly are community crime fighters.

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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?

What is apparent that X now publishes the actual location of a user but Neighbourhood Watch does only show the location a user registers at but not the actual location of the user. same with Met Engage and Neighbourhood Alert.