The Met confirmed a total of 636 arrests, 242 on Sunday and 394 on Monday, with 121 from live facial recognition, in its final update of 1 September 2026 (Metropolitan Police, 1 Sep 2026).
Resolves on the Metropolitan Police newsroom at news.met.police.uk, on the force's final end-of-Carnival update, which it publishes on the Tuesday after the bank holiday. YES if the total number of arrests confirmed there for the two-day policing operation exceeds 400. Figures the force itself labels provisional, and arrests from pre-Carnival warrant operations, do not count. If that source has not published in time, BBC News and The Guardian settle it.
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.