Thamesfield’s Met ward panel meets tonight to decide what its Safer Neighbourhoods officers focus on next, with neither of the borough’s two loudest grievances currently on the table.
The panel meets at St Mary’s Church on Putney High Street at 6.30pm to review and reset the three policing priorities that steer where Thamesfield’s officers spend their time. The ward’s current priorities are street violence, theft and shoplifting, and pedal cycle theft.
Those three were set on 20 May in response to a vehicle-crime spike. The mechanism is straightforward: residents meet the local team, agree what officers should focus on, and review it again a few months later. Something on the list gets officer time. Something nobody raises does not. It happens in the room so if you want to help decide what the local police will focus on, you need to attend.
This month, two things are generating more public reaction in Thamesfield than anything on that list.
The badges nobody can protect
Seven vehicles were hit overnight in Thamesfield at the end of last month. Six were targeted for their front badges and the parking sensors hidden behind them, on VW, Mercedes and BMW models, worth up to £2,000 a set.
PC Damian Catherall of Thamesfield’s Safer Neighbourhoods Team walked through the situation in a Met Engage post the next day and warned why there wasn’t much they could do about it: “Officers in vehicles covering the second half of SW area (Wandsworth and Merton) cover over 30 square miles and typically by the evening are very stretched… we are mainly on foot and few in number and though we work very unsociable hours covering a wide variety of shifts, we do not work through the night.”
He also noted that specialist units are needed to chase e-bike-riding thieves and they are also scarce. Yesterday, PCSO Eva Knedlova posted a fresh advisory – presumably after more thefts. It does not mention enforcement. “If you own a Volkswagen vehicle please be aware of recent thefts of badge and sensor from these vehicles,” it reads. “Please contact VW dealer for advice how to make your badge safe. Also try to park your vehicle, if possible, against an object or another vehicle to block access to the badge. Consider using a vehicle cover, motion sensors…”
The advice is sound but it asks drivers to solve their own vulnerability rather than describing how the Met plans to catch the thieves. Thamesfield’s own crime data for June, the most recent published anywhere, shows why that gap matters: vehicle offences across the ward are flat year on year, not because the thefts have stopped, but because a spree from three weeks ago has barely had time to register in the official numbers.
The cyclists nobody stops
The second grievance has been building for longer. Pedestrians are being killed or seriously injured by cyclists at an ever increasing rate: from 137 in 2016 to 234 in 2025, a 71% increase. The injury rate per billion miles cycled climbed from 41 to 64 over the same period, a rise of 56%, even as cycling itself grew by only 9%. Comparing 2019 with 2025 alone, to strip out the pandemic years, cycling traffic rose 1% while pedestrians seriously hurt by cyclists rose 68%.
Half of the pedestrians hurt are on a pavement or a marked crossing, the two places where cycling is either illegal outright or requires stopping at a red light. When we ran a story on that last week, reader response was almost unanimous: 97% of nearly 300 respondents, 89% of them strongly, said police should enforce pavement and red-light cycling.
None of that has ever translated into a priority. As we reported in August, “We have no stats on the number of cyclists stopped for going through a red light even though it is illegal, in large part because no one is being stopped for doing so. It is currently, in the Met’s eyes, not a priority.” Cycle theft has been a Thamesfield priority since May. Cyclist danger, a different problem entirely, has not been raised anywhere in Putney’s seven wards.
What happens tomorrow
Whether either grievance gets picked up is a direct test of a process that only works if people turn up to it. The Thamesfield Ward Panel meets from 6.30pm to 8.30pm at St Mary’s Church on the High Street. It is open to all Thamesfield residents.
If you want pavement or red-light cycling treated as a priority, or the badge-theft spree treated as more than an inconvenience for VW, Mercedes and BMW owners, there is an easy to make that case: be in the room. Dangerous or antisocial cycling can also be reported to the Met on 101 or through its online reporting tool at any time, and specifying that it happened on the pavement is what makes it a reportable offence rather than a nuisance.
On the ward’s own data, shoplifting is almost certain to remain a priority tomorrow: it is the single largest and fastest-rising crime line in Thamesfield, up 16% on the year. Vehicle crime is the more likely new entrant, not because the June figures show a rise yet, but because a documented spree and a fortnight of public pressure carry weight a panel meeting was designed to register. Whether cyclist danger joins them is, on the evidence gathered so far, the more open question.
Other ward meetings this month
If you live in other parts of Putney, your quarterly ward meetings where you can set your own priorities are also later this month.
- East Putney, 17 September, 6pm to 7pm, Putney High School (Putney Hill entrance).
- West Putney, 29 September, 6.30pm, Granard School.
