Newham recorded the highest number of gun crime offences of any London borough last month, according to figures published on the Metropolitan Police’s crime dashboard.
The east London borough logged nine firearms offences during September 2026, putting it ahead of Haringey, Hillingdon and Waltham Forest, which each recorded eight. Across the capital as a whole, 130 gun crime offences were recorded in September.
Enfield, Lambeth and Southwark followed with seven offences each, while Barnet and Tower Hamlets recorded six. Westminster logged five, and nine boroughs — Barking and Dagenham, Bexley, Brent, Bromley, Ealing, Greenwich, Hackney, Sutton and Wandsworth — recorded four apiece.
Camden, Croydon and Islington recorded three each. Harrow, Havering, Kensington and Chelsea and Redbridge recorded two each, while Hammersmith and Fulham, Kingston upon Thames, Lewisham and Merton had the lowest totals with one offence each. No figure was displayed for Richmond upon Thames in the data supplied.
What the numbers cover
It is worth understanding what sits behind the label. “Gun crime offences” in Met Police recording covers more than shootings — the category includes possession of firearms, threats made with guns and incidents where a firearm is reported even if never discharged. A borough can climb the table on the strength of seizures and arrests as well as attacks, which is one reason police urge caution about reading a league table as a straightforward map of danger.
That said, September did bring genuine violence. On September 14, police and paramedics were called to Leigham Court Road in Streatham after reports of gunshots; a man in his 20s was taken to hospital with injuries described as not life-threatening. Later in the month, reports of shots fired near Green Lanes and Pemberton Road in Harringay prompted a police investigation, with officers recovering spent bullet casings at the scene.
October has already added to the toll. On October 3, a man was taken to hospital with potentially life-changing injuries after a shooting in Wembley, and on October 2 a man was shot dead on Braybrook Street in East Acton while attending a memorial service.
How the dashboard works
The figures come from the Met’s public crime dashboard, which publishes monthly offence counts for every London borough and is updated as new data lands. Anyone can look up their own borough and compare it against neighbours or against previous months — the same dataset journalists and researchers use to track trends. It is worth remembering that a single month is a snapshot: boroughs move up and down the table through the year, and a high count can reflect a burst of proactive policing — weapons seized, arrests made — as much as a burst of violence. The Met cautions against treating any one month’s table as a safety ranking, and the longer view, across a year or more, The dashboard also breaks figures down by offence type, so readers can see how much of a borough’s total comes from possession or threats rather than shootings.
Enforcement and the courts
The Met says firearms offending remains a priority, with dedicated operations targeting the supply of weapons alongside neighbourhood policing aimed at the disputes that precede shootings. When cases reach court, the sentences can be severe — men jailed for 55 years over a shooting outside a Bexleyheath nightclub showed how heavily the courts weigh firearms offending.
Police encourage anyone with information about guns in their community to come forward, whether to officers directly or anonymously via Crimestoppers. The dashboard figures are updated regularly, and next month’s release will show whether September’s pattern — Newham out in front, the usual east and north London cluster close behind — holds or shifts.
