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Eight people have been arrested after the Metropolitan Police descended on Green Lanes in Haringey on Friday the 23rd of October, in an operation aimed at businesses that were suspected of running illegal gambling from their premises. The Met carried out the sweep alongside the National Crime Agency and Immigration Enforcement, with the eight people in question being held on suspicion of a variety of offences, with enquiries continuing.
The police haven’t named the businesses involved, nor have they said what sort of gambling is alleged to have been going on inside them, so for now there’s no telling whether this was a case of a few unlicensed machines or something more organised in its nature. What the Met has said, though, is that the raid followed repeated complaints from people who live and trade on the road about crime and anti-social behaviour.
What the Police Have Said
Inspector Asad Ikram, speaking after the operation, said,
This activity demonstrates our continued commitment to working with partners to tackle organised criminality, protect local communities and respond to concerns raised by residents. We will continue to utilise intelligence-led operations and partnership resources to identify and disrupt those involved in criminal activity across the North Area.
The National Crime Agency doesn’t tend to turn up for a bit of trouble over a slot machine, so its presence alongside Immigration Enforcement suggests that the police think that there’s more to this than the odd rogue shopkeeper.
That being said, with nobody charged at the time of writing, there’s a limit to how much should be read into anything. Interestingly, the Gambling Commission, which was in on the summer’s raids in South Yorkshire, isn’t amongst the agencies that the Met has listed as being involved this time around.
A Borough with Gambling on Its Mind
The raid lands barely three weeks after Haringey Council’s Adults and Health Scrutiny Panel was told that more than one in 30 residents are thought to be ‘high risk’ gamblers. Will Maimaris, the council’s Director of Public Health, told councillors on the first of October that the borough has some of the highest densities of gambling premises anywhere in the country, with much of it packed into its poorest neighbourhoods.
Green Lanes has been at the sharp end of that argument for years, as you might imagine. Back in 2020, local residents were writing to the council to object to plans for a round-the-clock adult gaming centre at 519 Green Lanes, citing the fact that there were plenty of betting shops already on the road. Those rows were about licensed operators, though. Friday’s raid concerns premises suspected of offering gambling with no licence at all, which puts them outside of the Gambling Commission’s oversight entirely.
Part of a Wider Crackdown
Haringey is far from alone in this. In July, the Gambling Commission joined South Yorkshire Police and Immigration Enforcement in raiding two unlicensed venues in Doncaster, where eight people were arrested, one under the Gambling Act 2005 and seven for immigration offences. Officers came away with just under £9,000 in cash, along with poker tables and slot machines that had been used there.
A few weeks later, on the fourth and fifth of August, the same partnership hit venues on London Road in Sheffield and Silver Street in Doncaster, finding 16 illegal betting terminals and seizing more than £110,000 in cash, as well as gold in the form of bars, coins and jewellery. Whether Green Lanes turns up anything on that scale obviously remains to be seen, but with nothing said publicly so far about what, if anything, officers took away on Friday, we can only speculate.