London’s Multicultural Notting Hill Carnival Sees 169 Arrests on Opening Day

The first full day of the annual Afro-Caribbean Notting Hill Carnival in London saw nearly 170 arrested, including for attacks on emergency workers and sexual assaults.

Despite considerable efforts to ramp up security for the yearly West London street festival, such as the Metropolitan Police banning 330 people from attending, dozens of zombie knives being seized, 7,000 officers being deployed, and City Hall granting organisers an additional £4.6 million ($6.23m) to hire double the number of “stewards” and to ramp up CCTV surveillance, the multicultural festival was still marred by crime.

According to the Met, there were 169 arrests on the first day of the two-day street party. The capital’s police force said that they made arrests for “possession of drugs, possession of weapons, assaults (including assaults on emergency workers) and sexual offences.”

Police also responded to two knife attacks, which resulted in injuries to a leg and hand, thankfully neither of which resulted in life-threatening or altering injuries.

Meanwhile, the London Fire Brigade said that it was forced to deploy four fire engines and 25 firefighters after a van was set on fire in the Notting Hill area on Sunday, reportedly sparked by a barbecue.

The Carnival has become an increasingly controversial event on the annual calendar for the British capital, with opponents criticising the multicultural festival for frequent lewd displays from attendees and for the hundreds of arrests made every year, often including sexual violence and attacks on police.

This has seen a widespread effort among the political, police, and media establishments to defend the street party and to minimise the criminality associated with it. Indeed, in a statement on Sunday, Scotland Yard said: “While officers responded to a number of incidents as would be anticipated at event of this scale, the mood has been overwhelmingly positive and celebratory.”

“The policing operation for the first full day of Notting Hill Carnival has ensured that the vast majority of people who attended were able to do so safely,” the force added.

Met Police Commander Claire Smart, who was put in charge of the policing operation associated with the Carnival, claimed that cooperation with the event’s organisers had resulted in a “reduction in the levels of serious violence seen at the event in previous years.” For context, over the full two-day period last year, some 528 people were arrested.

At the time of this report, London Mayor Sadiq Khan has not acknowledged the arrests. Khan, who personally attended Sunday’s festivities, said that this year’s Carnival was “bigger, bolder and more vibrant than ever” and that it was “great to join millions of Londoners and visitors to celebrate Caribbean culture and community.”

Earlier this week, the Carnival’s chief executive, Matthew Phillip, complained to the BBC that it was “unfair that Carnival is always targeted as a cause” of violence, claiming that it was “a victim of crime rather than a perpetrator.”

“We want people to come and celebrate carnival in the spirit that it’s meant to be, and that’s bringing people together, no matter what religion, race they are, to come and celebrate,” he said.