Met crackdown on mobile theft

Mobile phone theft continues to have a significant impact on Londoners. Over the past year, officers and staff across the Met have been working tirelessly to protect the public and bring offenders to justice, using precision policing to bear down on the most prolific offenders.  

They have made thousands of arrests, recovered tens of thousands of stolen phones and reduced phone theft across London by more than 10,000 offences. We’ve also seen a 30 per cent reduction in theft in the West End alone which has been frequently pinpointed as a phone theft hotspot. 

This progress is the result of sustained, precise and collaborative work by frontline and specialist teams across the Met, including local policing, Specialist Crime, forensics and intelligence. 

To maintain this downward trend, we have kick-started the year with a period of intensified activity targeting phone theft and the organised criminality behind it.

The operation involved extensive activity across the Met, including proactive frontline teams intercepting offenders caught stealing phones on the street, specialist crime units targeting organised groups behind these crimes, and Forensics teams working with officers to identify suspects connected to phone theft using Forensic Image Management System (FIMS). 

In this round of activity, the key results currently include: 

These impressive results build on the success of previous phone theft operations and continue to protect and deliver justice for victims.