Why Workforce Risk Assessment Needs to Look Past the Building's Own Front Door

Part one of two. This piece is about the data: what it shows, and what it quietly leaves out. Part two is about the commute itself — the human experience the data can't capture.

Understanding the Data Landscape

By most measures, the City of London is the safest place in England and Wales. Independent analysis of police-recorded crime consistently ranks it at or near the top of every safety index. It boasts the lowest overall crime rate of any police force area in the country, significantly below London’s average and the national rate. If a bank's security team reviewed the official statistics for its own square mile address, the picture would appear reassuring.

However, this picture is significantly incomplete. Understanding why this is the case reveals critical insights about how financial institutions currently assess risk to their personnel.

A Tale of Two Boundaries

The City of London Police force is one of the smallest in the country by resident population. A few thousand people live within its boundary, while the daytime working population swells to hundreds of thousands. This mismatch is more significant than it first appears.

When crime data is published at street or neighbourhood level, individual incidents are deliberately shifted from their true location. This is done to prevent them from being traced back to identifiable individuals or premises. For larger forces, this adjustment is barely noticeable; the volume of data makes a handful of relocated points insignificant. However, for a force the size of the City of London, the same safeguard must work harder. A review of a full month's published street-level crime data for the force revealed that roughly one in eight recorded incidents was attributed to locations nowhere near the City, with some scattered as far as the south coast.

This is not a flaw in the data; it is a deliberate and reasonable privacy protection. However, it means that fine-grained, address-level crime statistics for very small police force areas cannot be interpreted with the same confidence as those for larger metropolitan forces. The City of London, uniquely among UK financial centres, is precisely this kind of small force situated in the middle of an enormous commuter flow.

What the Aggregate Figures Still Tell Us

Force-wide totals do not suffer from this issue. The safeguard that scatters individual incidents within a small area does not alter the total number of incidents recorded. The aggregate picture for the City tells a more nuanced story than the label of “safest place in the country” suggests.

When broken down by offence type rather than taken as a single headline rate, the City of London ranks as the second most dangerous police force area in England and Wales for theft from the person. This rate is close to double the national average, with only London as a whole ranking higher.

This well-supported figure exists beneath the overall crime rate that makes the City appear uniformly safe. The aggregate is not incorrect; it simply answers a different question than the one a security team needs. The critical inquiry is not, "Is this area dangerous?" but rather, "Is my workforce, walking through it twice a day, actually exposed?"

It is essential to be cautious about what this figure implies. A high ranking does not necessarily mean the City's streets are particularly dangerous.

Given the small resident population relative to the daytime workforce, a more plausible interpretation is that the City attracts offenders rather than producing them. A concentration of higher-value targets, moving in high volume through a compact area, is likely to draw acquisitive crime, regardless of how orderly or well-policed the streets are.

This interpretation suggests that the elevated figure reflects more about who is drawn to operate within the City and from where, rather than the inherent danger of the area itself. This is an interpretation, not something the data alone can confirm. It would require offender-residency data, not victim-location data, for proper validation. However, it provides a more precise understanding than simply stating that this area is more dangerous than it appears, aligning with the argument that follows.

The Building Was Never the Right Unit of Analysis

None of this discussion is limited to the City of London specifically. It highlights a broader issue with how organisations assess environmental risk to their staff: by defaulting to the postcode of the office itself.

An employee's actual exposure to crime, disorder, and other street-level risks is not determined by where their desk is located. It is shaped by the journey they take to reach it and the journey home. This includes a walk from a station, a wait at a bus stop, or a transfer between two lines at a busy interchange. That journey often crosses several policing boundaries before it ever reaches the office postcode. Each of those boundaries can have a materially different risk profile, sometimes significantly higher or lower than its neighbour, often within just a few hundred metres.

A risk assessment that stops at the building's address effectively assumes an employee's day begins and ends the moment they walk through the door. In dense, multi-jurisdictional environments like central London, this assumption omits most of the actual exposure.

A Different Starting Question

This analysis does not argue that City of London crime statistics are being misused deliberately, nor does it suggest that any single number should cause alarm. Instead, it advocates for a more precise question.

Rather than asking whether an office address appears safe on paper, a more useful exercise is to map the specific stations, interchanges, and street corridors a workforce actually traverses. We should ask what the aggregate, force-level evidence—not the fragile hyper-local detail—indicates about each of these routes.

For an industry that invests considerable effort in assessing operational resilience, counterparty risk, and cyber exposure down to granular detail, the physical environment that employees navigate twice a day remains, for most organisations, entirely unmeasured.

This piece has focused on the data: force boundaries, published crime rates, and what they reveal—or fail to reveal—about an organisation's address. It has said little about what any of this actually feels like or how people get to work in the first place.

This focus is intentional, and it represents only half the picture. The next piece will set aside the numbers and examine the other half: how most people arrive in the City each day—on foot, by Tube, by bus, or in combination—and what that daily movement pattern signifies for understanding real workforce exposure, beyond just the statistics behind it.

Anthony Hegarty is a former Metropolitan Police Officer and the founder of DSRM Risk, working across Seoul, Tokyo, and London on physical and commuter risk assessment for organisations in financial services, law, construction, and healthcare.