Southfields residents can meet their local policing team outside the station this morning, as part of a month that has seen e-bike seizures, a speeding crackdown and a shoplifter chased down on foot across neighbouring wards.
PC Robert Quijano Amigo and colleagues from the Southfields Safer Neighbourhoods Team will be at a street briefing outside Southfields Tube station from 11am to midday. It’s an open street briefing, the kind the team runs to hear directly from residents, whether that’s a specific concern or a general question about what they’ve been doing.
The Southfields team also has new priorities to discuss. All three have changed in the past month: shoplifting and the theft of parcels were added as priorities on 11 July, and motor vehicle crime was reframed a week earlier, on 4 July, dropping the previous focus on violence, vehicle crime and anti-social behaviour around Southfield Lane and Replingham Road.
Southfields remains the quietest of the seven Putney wards, with 47 recorded offences in June, the lowest total in the patch, though offences over the past year are up 14 per cent on the year before. Vehicle crime itself has stayed roughly flat: theft from a vehicle in the ward rose from 73 to 78 incidents over the same 12 months, within the normal month-to-month swings for a ward this size.
Enforcement across Putney
It follows a month of visible enforcement on Putney High Street and the streets around it. Officers from the Thamesfield and East Putney Safer Neighbourhoods Teams have carried out several seizures of illegal e-bikes and e-scooters there, targeting machines that break the legal limits for what counts as an ordinary pedal cycle.
Those limits matter because they decide whether a rider needs a licence, insurance and registration at all. A machine is only legally an e-bike if its motor delivers no more than 250 watts and cuts out once the rider reaches 15.5mph under power. Anything stronger is treated in law as a motorbike or moped, whether it looks like one or not.
That’s what officers found on Old York Road in Wandsworth Town, where the Safer Neighbourhoods Team seized an e-bike whose motor exceeded the 250-watt limit. A separate operation is planned in West Putney in the next few days, targeting speeding.
The month’s other headline arrest came in Thamesfield, where a PCSO helped arrest two shoplifting suspects after chasing them on foot for roughly half an hour. Sgt Gary Berry, the Thamesfield team’s new sergeant, is fronting the enforcement drive, two months after he described how his team tracked down one of Putney’s most wanted men.
Thamesfield has the borough’s highest shoplifting count by some distance.
A card fraud alert also went out covering West Hill and East Putney, following a card-trapping device found on a cash machine two weeks ago. The Met’s alert did not specify a precise location for the new incident.
Southfields Safer Neighbourhoods Team can be contacted by email via the Met’s MetEngage page. To report a crime, call 101, or 999 in an emergency.
