There is a new Met Police unit due to grace the streets of the capital, designed to combat the scourge of mobile phone snatching and gang crime.
The novel factor here is that they will be aboard new electric dirt bikes - silent - but deadly for catching crims, they are hoping.
A huge number of phones are snatched from people every day in London – apparently one every 6 minutes - blimey, shocking - it’s definitely time a better attempt to apprehend them was made!
Much of this phone crime is carried out by gangs, either on bicycles or electric motorbikes which can move swiftly and silently through the streets to creep up on folks unawares.
The new electric motorcycle mounted police unit for 2025 is going to be called the Flying Squad (will it be nicknamed the electric Sweeney perhaps? Which of you out there is old enough to remember The Sweeney?). It will comprise police, mounted on specially adapted electric Sur-Ron Ultra Bee electric dirt bikes. The new machines, costing about £5000 each, will have a 74V, 55Ah battery pack, linked to an 8kW electric motor offering speeds of up to 70mph and acceleration of 0-50 in three seconds. Quite nippy.
They are going to use these as one of the tools to try and beat the phone snatchers at their own game, by creeping quietly after them and then, if necessary using new powers they’ve been given, like tactical contact! This means that the police have been given permission to actually physically tackle thieves and take them down using the bike, whether the thieves are on foot or on an electric bike, motorcycle or bicycle. This gives the new Met squad a lot more clout, and is a move away from past laws like, for example, the one which says they couldn’t pursue anyone on a bike if they weren’t wearing a helmet. This law invariably just meant that criminals fleeing on motorcycles would simply ditch their helmets and ride away without fear of pursuit.
In order to carry out these types of arrests, which might involve physically tackling criminals with bikes, the new squad has apparently been given specialist training so that they can, hopefully, carry it out safely and effectively.
A spokesperson from the Met has said this about the problem:
“Robbery and theft is invasive, frustrating and it’s simply not acceptable in our city. That’s why we are using data and intelligence to deploy officers into key hotspot areas. These are a mix of uniformed officers to deter criminals, and plain clothed officers to catch offenders.
“We encourage people to report as soon as they can whenever they have been a victim of robbery or theft, to increase the chances of us catching offenders.
“In addition to keeping Londoners safe, we’re also using technology and data to build intelligence and track stolen phones. We’re then using this data to develop our intelligence about common locations for where stolen phones are kept, helping us to recover devices.”
The exponential rise in UK, and particularly London, mobile phone theft is so that the stolen phones can be hacked to harvest the personal data, passwords and banking details etc of the phone’s owner in order to aid online fraud. Apparently the stolen phones themselves can eventually end up in other countries like Hong Kong where they don’t stand any chance of being traced or returned to their rightful owners.
It behoves us to recommend the (insert B word here if required) obvious, which is really try and keep hard copies of all your contacts, addresses, phone numbers, emails, bank deets etc just in case this horrible thing happens to you, so that you have some back up and can cancel bank details etc speedily if required. We are all guilty of carrying all of our lives on our phones, so having your phone stolen is devastating.
Hopefully the Met may be a bit more on it with these new initiatives, but it’s actually a very hard thing to stop on the wild streets of London town, so it’s wise to take what precautions you can yourself and stay frosty at all times.
Have you been a victim, or have personal experience of this (My daughter in New Cross has!) Let us know what happened to you or anyone you know if so, we’d be interested to know.
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