How Nextdoor became the new Neighbourhood Watch

Long before the official numbers began to rise, back in 2014, it was clear that knife crime was on the up. You could tell by the way small boys chased each other through the park with machetes, and by the zombie blades left in flower beds.

Now, seven years later, I feel the same way about what goes by the cosy-sounding name of ‘neighbourhood crime’. There’s the fashion for car theft (as poor Sam Leith found out), and the constant predatory circling of iPhone thieves on e-scooters. But worse than that, I think burglary is back, and I think it’s thanks to crack. We know drug use is creeping up: on Tuesday it was announced that drug-related deaths in England are at the highest level they’ve ever been. As for burglary stats, for those I rely on Nextdoor.

Every morning, instead of reading a newspaper, I open the Nextdoor app. It is a collection of conversations between people who live in the same area organised by subject (or thread), and it’s utterly absorbing. I had no idea so many people owned microchip readers just so as to reunite lost cats with their owners.

Whenever the rain stops, according to Nextdoor, the burglars appear. Come a balmy night, and inevitably the following morning Nextdoor will report that some poor person’s basement window has been levered open or their front door kicked in. The thieves take laptops, TVs, car keys… And because so many people now have Ring doorbell cameras, the perps are often photographed, caught as if in aspic, in a fish-eye lens. The police are called, shown the photos, but there’s never any word on the app of an arrest.

In mid-July, a Nextdoor user posted the pic of a man with a haunted rat face who’d broken into her apartment in Hackney.