The Met Engage system restricts you to one ward and you cannot discuss neighbouring wards, which strongly affect you. Tower Hamlets Crime Watch enables communication of all within the Tower Hamlets boundaries, but members need to be ID and address verified. Join

The Met Police Met Engage does not link to us directly because we are 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 personally 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.

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. On Met Engage, there are no community coordinators and you only get messages from Police Officers or Police staff. It is not necessary, nor do we recommend that you sign up for Neighbourhood Watch via the Met Engage system. It is not police monitored like OWL was.

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.

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 service and contact police to follow up on crime reports if necessary.

All officers allocated to a ward are listed but only one contact email address per ward is given for all officers.

Met Police website

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

This problem has not changed now with Met Engage.

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.

Inviting unverified users to contact police to inquire about cases previously listed with police, those may be crimes or incidences which received Crime or CAD numbers will cause a tremendous and intolerable strain on local officers. 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.

We do NOT recommend Met Engage or Neighbourhood Watch, as systems that do not verify users.

Tower Hamlets Crime Watch

has a membership system, which required people to provide

• proof of ID
• proof of address
• proof of certificates of knowledge about safety
• or proof of voluntary services for major providers.
• We are a locally relevent service.

We take safety very seriously and do not require our members to identify themselves as such. I have been approached by various people who are worried about being attacked, having property destroyed by local criminals for coming out as police informer.

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.

Sadly 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.

I fear that the system of Met Engage will probably meet the same fate so Police OWL and frizzle out after the first big push to get it started.

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.

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.