00:02Yeah, we're really winning to have the lowest phone theft numbers ever over the last four
00:09years. We've all seen the surge of that. As we all walk around the streets with a thousand
00:13pound phones potentially in our hands, that's become very attractive and we've had to change
00:17policing to counter that threat. It's sort of, to use a sporting light, it's like a full
00:21court press. We're doing everything. It's everything from street policing, street policing
00:26that's been supercharged. We've got officers on these electric bikes so that the thieves
00:31can't get away from us. We're using drones in some of our pursuits overhead.
00:34It's almost like land and sea and air.
00:36We will fight them on the beaches. Exactly. And then we've had, that's not a very good
00:40choice of impression, is it?
00:41I've heard better than Mark. Go on.
00:43And then we've got our organised crime teams because there's a criminal business model
00:47behind this. There's people exporting thousands of phones to China, to Algerian places. We've
00:51broken some of those gangs and that's like, that breaks the model down. The phone shops
00:56that some of them are, dodgy phone shops, recycling things, we've been tackling those.
01:00The Flying Squad have been working on some of the organised gangs that have been doing robberies
01:05of sort of the mainstream phone shops that have got thousands of Apple phones there selling
01:10like a Vodafone shop or something like that or the Apple store. So we've been using the
01:14Flying Squad to take on the gangs doing that. And you add all that together and we're breaking
01:20the model and the numbers are coming down. And we put pressure on Apple as well to improve
01:24their security, to make it harder for people to reboot the phones to sell them.
01:27We're going to take a call on this in just a moment. Final question before we go to the
01:30first caller. Commissioner, when did this initiative start and why? What drove you and your colleagues
01:35to do this?
01:36So we could see the numbers were skyrocketing up, weren't they? Two, three years ago,
01:41numbers of phone tests were skyrocketing up. And we have to win on things like this because
01:44people want to feel safe in London, particularly in the centre of London where we all sort of,
01:47lots of people shot, work, etc. So this was Operation Reckoning 6. It was a month of activity,
01:54700 arrests, multiple warrants, say, across phone shops. For the first time we've had been
01:59working with other forces across the country who they've got issues as well, not the same scale,
02:03but so that's been joined up. We've got international connections. So we've been working
02:07with Algeria, we've been working with China, working with Hong Kong.
02:09Throughout September, hundreds of suspects were arrested for phone theft,
02:13robbery, and handling stolen goods. And investigators seized drugs, knives, guns,
02:18cash, and more than 110 illegal e-bikes. Earlier this year, Sir Mark Rowley pushed phone companies
02:25to make stolen handsets unusable bricks, as the force revealed it had seen adverts on Snapchat
02:31offering children as much as £380 to steal a single iPhone, with a bonus of 100 for stealing 10.
02:39The international trade in stolen phones is worth millions of dollars, with a device stolen in London
02:45worth more in countries like China. Criminals are increasingly using social engineering to get
02:50into phones, the force said, by posing as known businesses and contacting victims on other devices
02:57in a bid to get passwords and account details.
