Sir Sadiq Khan has announced that additional funds from his next budget will be devoted to what City Hall is calling “a major new crackdown on mobile phone theft in the capital” as political and media opponents continue to portray the capital as “lawless”.
Focussed primarily on the West End, the initiative includes a proposal for the Metropolitan Police Service to set up “a new mobile phone Command Cell” for coordinating intelligence about thefts and robberies of phones and responses to them.
City Hall has also published Met crime figures showing that the number of recorded thefts of mobile phones in Greater London as a whole fell from a total of 81,365 to one of 71,391, a drop of 12.3 per cent, during a recent one-year period.
The 12 months to November 2025 saw:
- The number of Met-recorded offences categorised as “knife crime” reduce by 2,420 or 14.5 per cent (“knife crime” ranges from an injury being inflicted by a bladed incident to assailants intimating to victims that they have a knife in their possession without one necessarily being seen).
- The number of recorded violent offences resulting in injury falling by 4,884 offences, or seven percent. The downward trend has been seen to varying degrees in all 32 boroughs except Harrow.
- “Personal robbery”, which means theft from the person involving violence, has fallen by 4,309 offences (or 15 per cent) according to the Met figures.
- Crimes involving the use of guns, which are much rarer, have fallen too, including incidents in which they were fired, according to the Met stats.
- City Hall also says police data show that robberies of all kinds have fallen by 46 per cent in what it terms “key hotspots” with thefts in those areas down by “more than a quarter”. It attributes these falls to funding from the Mayor enabling a doubling of the number of police officers in the West End as a whole, “leading to a 25 per cent reduction in theft”.
Sir Mark Rowley said the Met has been “relentlessly cracking down on phone thieves and dismantling organised criminal networks at every level – from the pickpockets and phone snatchers operating on our streets, to the handlers who profit from their crimes, right through to the international networks exporting stolen phones overseas.
As well as celebrating the new figures, Rowley renewed his call for manufacturers and tech companies to “do more to stop criminals being able to reset, reuse or resell stolen phones” and for the courts to “play their part by preventing repeat offenders being bailed only to go out and offend again,” undermining officers’ work.
The Met said that “local officers” had been working alongside “specialist proactive teams” using drones, Sur-On e-bikes and live facial recognition technology to catch offenders and disrupt the stolen phone market.
To observe some the Met’s work, the Mayor visited Charing Cross police station from which operations against crime involving culprits using two-wheeled vehicles are conducted. The station was the subject of a BBC Panorama investigation, which uncovered numerous examples of Met officers falling below professional standards. Several of them have faced disciplinary proceedings and charges of gross misconduct were last week found proven against a constable who has since retired.
The Mayor’s final draft budget, covering proposed spending on all members of the Greater London Authority group of organisations, including the Met, for the financial year 2026/27 will be published on Wednesday.
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