London Borough of Waltham Forest Community Safety Pilots

Residents across the London Borough of Waltham Forest were reporting high levels of anxiety regarding their personal safety amid growing fears of increasing crime in their communities. It is within this context that the funding was secured two Community Safety ‘safer streets’ pilots to be delivered in two key areas: Chingford Mount and South Leytonstone. The six-month pilots which introduced new ways of working aimed to: 

• Act quickly on easy issues and proactively with high profile patrols 

• Increase joint working 

• Have an enhanced reporting portal to better report and understand residents concerns 

• Have a deeper engagement with residents and more targeted communication  

• Be led by data to tackle crime 

Approach

M·E·L Research was commissioned to conduct a qualitative review of the pilots and worked with the LBWF project team from the outset. The research worked directly with several key stakeholder audiences including: Project staff and partners (including the police); residents; elected council members and local business. It was conducted in two phases: 

• Phase 1 at the start of the pilot: explored expectations, potential challenges, changes to new ways of working, levels of interest and awareness in the pilots, assumed priorities and areas of interest. 

• Phase 2 towards the end of the pilot: explored whether expectations had been met, what worked well and less well, key lessons learned regarding engagement, partnerships, delivery and ways of working. 

In total we facilitated four face to face community workshops with residents, four face to face focus groups with staff, 20 face to face interviews with local businesses, 9 ethnographic trails with residents, staff and elected members (walk and talks), four remote interviews with elected members and eight remote interviews with staff, partners and community police officers.  

The ethnographic trail methods of this research worked particularly well and allowed residents and staff to take our community researcher to specific locations and ‘hot spots’ which were labelled as areas of concern. These included areas of flytipping, littering and known ASB activity. This permitted participants to talks specifically about their sense of place and space and how this impacted upon their views of safety and community cohesion. 

Outcomes

We presented a final report outlining stakeholder views of the pilot programme and detailing both practical and strategic recommendations. The report has been submitted as part of wider evidence to LBWF decision makers regarding future approaches to crime and personal safety issues, including assessing the potential for wider borough roll-out.