Notting Hill Carnival adds face-scan cameras. Arrests keep climbing.

What happened

The Met publishes its policing plan for the 60th Notting Hill Carnival, with additional live facial recognition cameras at the event and on the approaches to it, and sets out 2025’s outcomes, including 528 arrests.

The Met will use more face-scan cameras at Carnival this year. Live facial recognition compares faces in a crowd with a list of wanted people. In 2025 it identified 98 people, which led to 61 arrests and checks on 30 registered sex offenders. The new cameras will be at Carnival and on the streets leading to it.

The Metropolitan Police set out its plan on 28 August. It said its more active approach last year brought less serious violence.

Carnival, the biggest street festival in Europe, reached its 60th year only after City Hall found the money. On 27 March 2026 the Mayor of London promised £4.66 million more, on top of £946,300 already agreed. It pays for barriers, stewards and crowd plans that an independent review, ordered in 2024, said were needed.

The 2025 Carnival went ahead on £958,000 of one-off money from City Hall and the Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster councils, after the first part of that review.

The arrest total the Met publishes after the bank holiday has become the main way people judge the event. It moves with how the police work as much as with how people behave. Cameras on the approach streets turn existing cases of wanted people into arrests counted at Carnival. So the total can rise in a year the Met itself calls calmer.

Sources: Metropolitan Police, Mayor of London, Notting Hill Carnival Ltd

The Pattern

We took every Carnival on the streets since 2015 where the Met’s final arrest total is on record. We used the Met’s own statement where there was one, and the Guardian’s report of the Met’s figure where there was not. The question is the one the first market asks: did arrests pass 400? The 2018 and 2019 totals are left out because we found no trusted record of them. There was no Carnival in 2020 or 2021. That leaves seven years, all shown here.

The Read

History pointed to another high number, and the count delivered it. The Met reported 636 arrests, the highest on the record, with 193 on the streets leading to the event and 121 from face scans. Two things pushed the same way from the start. The bigger operation paid for by the March money, and more cameras on the approach streets, turn wanted-person cases into Carnival arrests that would not otherwise be counted there. That is why the count could climb in a year the Met describes as its second with much less serious violence.

The opposite view was that 528 was a one-off, and that barriers and stewards would prevent the trouble that leads to arrests. That view was wrong about the arrest total, though it may be right about injuries. The force reported two knife attacks, and neither was life-threatening.

The money question is still open. City Hall confirmed funding in July of 2025 and in March of 2026, each time months into the year and each time as one-off help. A promise of money for 2027 before December would break that habit, which is why it sits at one in five.