Our Community Safety work

As a council, we are committed to making Waltham Forest a place where residents feel safe and secure in their homes and neighbourhoods. We are working closely with our key partners, including the police and voluntary and community sector organisations, to prevent and tackle crime and ASB as one of our key council priorities. 

By adopting a cross-council approach to community safety, we have made preventing and reducing crime and ASB everybody’s business. Some examples of key actions and achievements across each area include: 

• Tackling anti-social behaviour: Our 12 ASB officers support the borough’s 280,000 residents with issues such as vandalism, noise disturbance or harassment. This includes investigating complaints, mediating disputes, supporting victims and gathering evidence for enforcement actions. 
• Building safer places: We've invested £1 million in our state-of-the-art CCTV facilities which are staffed 24/7, 365 days of the year, and include over 1,000 CCTV cameras at crime and ASB hotspots across the borough. 42 cameras are re-deployable to other areas as new ASB and crime issues emerge. We also have a live stream direct to the police borough control room so they can see images in real time.  
• Protecting our young people from crime and violence: We've funded a new multi-agency team of specialist case workers to work alongside partners to address the root causes of gang violence, and drive coordinated enforcement activity, curbing violence while simultaneously offering gang involved members a safe way out. Read the full strategy.
• Ending Violence Against Women and Girls: We're working with community partners to provide targeted practical, emotional and therapeutic support to over 5,000 survivors through our drop-in and community in-reach session. Read more information on our VAWG work. 
• Building stronger, more cohesive communities: We've engaged over 1,350 residents in our Citizens’ Assembly on the future of Neighbourhood Policing, resulting in tangible recommendations that are driving the council and policing to take sustained action to reshape local policing and strengthen trust across our communities. 
• Reducing reoffending: Worked collectively with partners through our multi-agency Integrated Offender Management (IOM) scheme to ensure high-risk offenders receive bespoke interventions targeted at their individual needs, including education, training, employment and housing support to break the cycle of repeat offending.

This is a selection of the Council and its partners' ongoing work to tackle crime and promote community safety. You can read more about our approach via the button below.

Crime should be reported directly to the police as soon as it is safe to do so. In an emergency, always call 999. If you are not in immediate danger, you can report crime by calling 101 or filling in a simple online form via the Metropolitan Police.

Anti-Social Behaviour should be reported to the ASB council team or by emailing communitysafety@walthamforest.gov.uk. ASB includes actions that cause harassment, alarm, or distress to people who are not part of the same household, including noise disturbances, neighbourly disputes, and vandalism but are not crimes.

Keep yourself and your property as safe as possible. For example, make yourself a less appealing target to thieves by keeping valuables out of sight while you’re out and about, and removing them from your vehicle. If you need to use your phone, try to stand away from the roadside, or close to a building or wall, so no one can come up behind you. 

Neighbourhood watch schemes (NWS) can reduce crime and ASB. Find out if there is a scheme near you or access further information on NWS or other crime prevention measures on the Neighbourhood Watch website.

You can also find safety advice on the Met Police’s website. 

You can find out more about different elements of the Council's Community Safety work below:

• How we're reducing crime and ASB in our community
• Our work to combat Violence Against Women and Girls
• Information about support for victims of crime
• Information on support and activities for young people (Space4All)
• Sign up to our monthly Community Safety Newsletter

You can also read our Community Safety strategies for more detailed information:

• Keeping Young People Safe from Violence strategy
• Protecting Communities from Harm Caused By Alcohol and Drugs Strategy
• Anti-Social Behaviour strategy

• If you'd like advice or support regarding hate, please email nospaceforhate@walthamforest.gov.uk
• If you'd like advice or support regarding Violence Against Women and Girls, please email vawg@walthamforest.gov.uk
• To contact us directly to find out more about the Council’s work on community safety, please contact us at communitysafety@walthamforest.gov.uk.