ARMED police took to the streets in a show of strength designed to make local estates safer and deter criminals who use guns.

Operation Neon was mounted last Thursday evening, and combined covert surveillance of firearms hotspots with high-visibility swoops involving dog handlers and an armed response unit.

It has been hailed as a success by the officer in charge, despite failing to catch or identify anyone involved in gun crime.

Detective Superintendent Sue Williams said: "This is a legitimate tactic. We are reassuring the community and showing criminals we won't allow them to take over our estates.

"These people will carry a gun for show, and if someone disrespects them, they get shot.

"It's alien to us as a police service.

"Operation Neon is to show that we won't tolerate firearms on our borough, and to show that we have guns too, and ours are bigger."

A police spokeswoman said there were no robberies anywhere in Waltham Forest that night.

Three plain-clothed "spotter" teams were out on estates around Leyton and Leytonstone looking for individuals who they believed were likely to be carrying guns.

Meanwhile, eight police vehicles were standing by to pursue and arrest anyone the teams identified.

They were called out twice during the five-hour surveillance operation, once on a fruitless chase into Hackney and once when spotters followed a suspect to Leyton's Beaumont estate.

A man was stopped at gunpoint by officers armed with sub-machine guns before he and his car were searched. However, he was not found to be carrying any firearms and was not arrested.

Waltham Forest is one of around ten London boroughs to have been made a priority for gun crime, following a spate of high-profile killings around the capital.

Over the past year, the borough has seen a 6.2 per cent decrease in gun crime, with 152 offences recorded in the 12 months to June 2007, compared with 162 for the previous year. There were 39 firearms offences from April to July.