Police swept up dozens of unlawful e-bikes in two days as drones watched each flip of the criminals wreaking havoc on the UK’s capital.
The Met has seized 52 unlawful e-bikes and mopeds throughout a two-day operation to deal with crime and anti (Picture: Metropolitan Police)
Police have seized a staggering 52 unlawful e-bikes and mopeds in simply two days in a conflict on ride-by focusing on vacationers visiting the UK’s theatre capital. The specialist operation in London’s West Finish concerned the usage of high-tech drones to trace and catch thugs fuelling the crimewave of jewelry, watch and cell phone thefts. Drones alongside bikes and dwell facial recognition are the most recent instruments the Metropolitan Police is utilizing to try to minimize the variety of road thefts occurring.
A cell phone is stolen within the capital each seven to eight minutes – and the power warns that youngsters as younger as 14 are being focused over social media and paid as much as £100 to steal telephones for organised crime gangs. Current figures present that between 2017 and February 27, 2024, out of a complete of 587,498 telephones stolen in London, excluding the Metropolis, simply 13,998 have been recovered. However the variety of recorded cell phone thefts in London fell to 71,391 final yr, in comparison with 81,365 in 2024 – a drop of 12%.
The seized e-bikes (Picture: Metropolitan Police)
And of their newest operation the power has seized 52 unlawful e-bikes and mopeds from criminals believed who travelled six miles into the vacationer hotspot from Harlesden.
The power mentioned the raids targeted exercise builds on months of sustained operations focusing on the harmful and unlawful use e-bikes and e-scooters because the Met continues to drive down neighbourhood crime.
Superintendent Luke Baldock, the Met’s lead officer for tackling e-bike and e-scooter crime, mentioned: “We perceive Londoners’ issues about how e-bikes and e-scooters are getting used to commit offences, equivalent to cellphone theft, housebreaking and different anti-social behaviour. That’s the reason the Met is continuous to ramp up motion and improve the roll-out of specialized operations throughout our neighbourhoods to deal with this sort of crime.
“This targeted exercise builds on the success of earlier operations which have seen hundreds of unlawful autos cleared from our streets and crushed.
Drone know-how was used to deal with crime (Picture: Metropolitan Police)
Throughout the two days of targeted exercise in Harlesden and the West Finish, police additionally made the next arrests:
A person present in possession of a fight knife.
A person needed on recall to jail in reference to a number of aggravated burglaries and offences associated to violence in opposition to ladies and ladies.
This targeted exercise follows a sequence of operations which have led to a document 2,741 seizures of unlawful e-bikes and e-scooters throughout the capital in 2025 and 2026. In hotspot areas equivalent to Westminster, neighbourhood offences are already down by 28.4 per cent this full yr up to now, the power says.
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