Chingford is one of the calmer corners of Waltham Forest, and it wins that comparison comfortably. Crime runs about a fifth below the borough rate. Violence makes up a smaller share of it than it does nationally. Car crime makes up a bigger one. The people with most to worry about here are the ones who leave the car unlocked.
The Metropolitan Police recorded 6,493 crimes in Chingford in the year to May 2026, a published rate of about 86 per 1,000 residents. That is roughly 20% below the Waltham Forest average for the same twelve months. A full year of figures smooths out the odd bad weekend, so the gap is a settled one.
Set side by side, the two rates make the point plainly: about 86 crimes per 1,000 residents in Chingford against about 107 across Waltham Forest as a whole. The borough figure takes in Walthamstow and Leyton as well as Chingford, and Chingford is the end of the borough pulling the average down.
The neighbourhood behind those numbers is suburban London with room to breathe. Chingford averages about 7,480 people per square kilometre, unemployment stood at about 4% at the 2021 Census, and about 8% of households were overcrowded. Those are the figures of a settled outer suburb of semis and terraces, with Epping Forest taking up the space a denser borough would have built on.
The mix is where Chingford's crime looks different from the national picture. Violence and sexual offences, a broad legal category that includes common assault without any injury, make up about 26% of Chingford's recorded crime, against about 35% across England and Wales. Anti-social behaviour accounts for about 21%, against 16% nationally. Vehicle crime is the outlier, at about 12% of the local total against 5% nationally. Shoplifting at about 7% and other theft at about 7% sit close to their national shares of 8% and 7%, and drugs offences make up about 6% against 4%. The street with a car on every driveway is where the numbers concentrate, and a garage that holds a car and not the garden furniture earns its keep here.
What happens after a report is a force-wide question, answered for the whole of London. The Metropolitan Police charges a suspect in about 10% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which places it 33rd of 42 forces. About 53% of the Met's cases close with no suspect identified. Those figures measure the force's success at solving crime across the capital and say nothing about how often crime happens in Chingford itself. A victim here gets the same odds as a victim in any other borough, which is the one way Chingford is entirely average.
Chingford is a safe place to live by any reasonable reading of the Met's own figures, and safer than the borough around it. Lock the car and most residents will find the crime statistics are about somebody else.