There are 3 Police Officers who are dedicated to making us feel safe in the High Street ward. They can be found at High Street Police Office, 191 - 193 High Street, E17 7BX. This station is home to the Safer Neighbourhoods Team for High Street ward, comprising Sgt Philip Steedman, PC Raffaela Soave, PC Keith Marriott and 4 PCSOs: Joy Wacha, Mark O'Neill, Paul Doe and Dennis Morgan. Should you think they can be of help to you, their numbers are 020 8721 2035 and 07843 291115.

The building is also home to Sgt Stefan Milkowski, PC Lewis Clarke,
PC Darren Egerton and PCSO Serdar Demirelli, who have a similar function for Hoe Street (Tel 020 8721 2642 and 07920 233821).

Sgt Rowan Healey, PC Charles Shyngle, PC Jamie Dove and PCSOs Vince Campbell, Fateh Faiz and Jess Williamson cover Markhouse Ward and answer to calls on 020 8721 2649 and 07920 233814.

According to the Met, the officers in a Safer Neighbourhoods team 'spend most of their time out on patrol in the neighbourhood, meeting the community and identifying and dealing with those crimes and issues you have told us cause you most concern.' For some reason in their travels around the community, I am left with an impression that they rarely seem to spot the same organized criminality the rest of us see every day and which goes on in broad daylight in the High Street. Nor do they seem to arrest anyone for it. It seems, instead, they spend a lot of time servicing the needs of the chain stores at the local Mall, directly opposite their front door. Despite the Mall having their own security guards they need to pull the police off other duties to help protect the merchandise from shoplifting. One shoplifter can apparently tie up a police officer with full powers of arrest for most of the rest of their shift in paperwork. Being so close they have no excuse not to go over the road, so by default and geography this is a local policing priority.

Another problem they have not been able to get on top of are the hotspots for muggings. There is one of these Bermuda triangles for missing police officers in the area from Walthamstow Central/Bus Station along the footpaths to the doors of the Mall and along the paths to the High Street itself. In other words, the so-called 'Town Square' area our planners were so proud of having created. In this area there are plenty of statistics about crimes, but not too much information is available about arrests and convictions. Possibly because the arrest and 'clear up' rate is pretty low and the methods favoured by the higher-ups in the Met are not making a difference. There is a steady stream of reports of such criminal activities in the Waltham Forest Guardian. Anyone walking around there will have spotted the beggars, alcoholic or drug-addicted, who congregate on the benches with a good line of sight to the cash points. The step from aggressive begging to mugging is not a difficult one for someone with an addiction to take. There are also some real villains about.

Another hotspot is in the immediate vicinity of the St James Street Station and at the bottom of the High Street around Oxfam. Here the perception of crime is high around the station.

For whatever reasons, there are not enough officers to do the job the community wants done in the High Street area, where the population is in flux as well as having expanded rapidly in the past couple of years but the forces of law and order have not yet woken up to the changed world they police. The Neighbrouhood Police Station is actually closed to the public from around 6.00pm (i.e for a large period of the year when it is dark in the early evening and commuters are going home or traders are still open and then cashing up). Foot patrols are rarely seen in residential areas, or after dark, while muggers, scam artists and pirate dvd sellers operate with apparent impunity in broad daylight.

What is the effect of policing us with the present levels of resources deployed in the present manner? There were 8.67 robberies per 1000 people in Walthamstow according to the July 2007 statistics compared to a National average of 1.13. Theft of motor vehicles ran at 6.13 per 1000 people against 3.64 nationally. Nevertheless, police who work this area have apparently claimed that Walthamstow is a safer area for them to work than some neighbouring boroughs. They think of the town centre as quiet and think of violence as 'youth on youth' and apparently not a big issue. (Though the Met recently pretended they had dealt with it round here anyway.)

Possibly it is a safe area and this is all about perceptions. We do hear sirens and helicopters at all hours of the night, but the perceptions are that these are not our local cops, just colleagues of theirs passing though on a jolly. We rarely see anyone caught for anything. It possibly is a safe place to work if the Police can stay in their Police station and just deal with shoplifters caught by someone else, though they did get out recently to put leaflets through every letter box in the area. These were inviting residents to a meeting to discuss crime at the Douglas Eyre Sports Centre in Coppermill Lane on Monday 10th March 2008 at 7.00pm. I wonder how much of their valuable shift time was spent on folding and delivering those?