OP Reckoning 6 - Tackling mobile phone-related crime

OP Reckoning 6 - Tackling mobile phone-related crime

Here’s the latest on mobile phone theft in your area.

In September, officers from Tower Hamlets Neighbourhood policing teams, supported by Trading Standards officers from Tower Hamlets Council’s Regulatory Services, took part in a national operation tackling mobile phone-related crime.

As part of the operation, the neighbourhood police teams took part in:

- Intelligence led high visibility patrols
- Proactive plain clothes patrols
- Operations targeting phone snatch offences and illegal e-bikes
- Joint visits with Tower Hamlets Council Trading Standards officers to shops that bought or sold second hand phones.
- Partnership working to identify outstanding suspects

As a result of this work:
• 29 shops were visited
• 291 phones had their IMEI number checked, which can help identify if a phone is stolen or not
• 1 stolen phone recovered
• 3 phones seized for investigation
• 3 arrests
• 60 wraps of class A recovered - 1 male arrested and charged with a drugs supply offence
• 5 laptops recovered that were stolen from a school burglary
• £6,000+ worth of counterfeit goods, including mobile phone cases and accessories, children’s backpacks and keyrings, unsafe international travel adapters and illicit tobacco seized
• A quantity of illicit cigarettes seized
• A large amount of drugs paraphernalia seized and investigation started into the shop owner
• E-bikes operation – 5 bikes and 1 scooter seized, 5 riders prosecuted and one person arrested
• Identified 8 suspects who were previously unknown from already reported offences

Cllr Kabir Ahmed, Cabinet Member for Public Protection and Integrated Enforcement, said: “We work in partnership with police to ensure that those committing crimes in our borough are brought to justice.

“Thank you to the Met Police and the council’s teams for these excellent results.”

DCI Michelle Peters, the BCU policing lead for Op Reckoning, said:

“Our people, working alongside our partners, are committed to making a real difference for our communities. By working together, sharing information and taking coordinated action, we can tackle the issues that cause the greatest harm and make our communities safer.”

We’ve put hundreds more officers on the frontlines of community crime-fighting teams, upping visible patrols in the right ‘hot spots’ so we can deter and catch criminals. These officers are working hard to bear down on mobile phone crime in London, arresting phone thieves on the street, shutting down vendors trading stolen devices and dismantling international criminal gangs.

We have now almost halved phone theft in Westminster, where it was most concentrated, following an intensive crackdown which has seen hundreds of arrests and thousands of phones recovered. After campaigning by the Met, Apple has also made a global change to its security system that better ensures stolen phones cannot be reused or resold – disrupting a highly organised international business model worth millions.

But we know there is more to do. That’s why we’re stepping up our use of technology, increasing our operations and working with phone companies to make it less appealing for criminals to commit these crimes in the first place.

You can report an incident of theft online at https://www.met.police.uk. 

We want your help to shape the future of policing across London. We are seeking your views on our new inclusion strategy to ensure that the Met is a police service that is trusted, representative and more effective at keeping London safe. You can have your say on our Inclusion Strategy consultation which runs until Thursday 26 November.