Police will be given powers to search properties without a warrant for stolen phones in a bid to crackdown on the “epidemic” of street theft. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the measures introduced in the Government's Crime and Policing Bill on Tuesday will "help take back control of town centres".
It would allow officers to enter a home if electronic location tagging, such as the “Find My iPhone” app, shows that a stolen item is in the property and it is “not practicable” to get a warrant from a court. However the move would still need to be signed off by an inspector.
Ms Cooper told Sky News: “In the run up to the election, we saw snatch theft go up by 50% in the space of two years. “A lot of that is driven by mobile phones. And you've got victims saying: ‘I can see where my phone is, I can track it’. And yet the police can't act.
“So we do think it's right to give the police stronger powers to be able to help communities really take back control of our town centres and feel safer on the streets.”. The measure is among dozens in the bill, which particularly focuses on bringing down lower-level offences such as theft and antisocial behaviour.
It will also introduce a specific offence of assaulting a retail worker, ban face coverings at many protests and criminalise the climbing of some war memorials. London has become the phone snatching capital of the UK. A mobile is now stolen in the city every six minutes with around 64,000 devices taken annually.
In March, the officers caught one of London’s most prolific phone snatchers: Sonny Stringer. They used their unmarked car to knock Stringer off his e-bike as he fled after terrorising victims in the West End and the Square Mile. Stringer, 28, was jailed for grabbing an astonishing 24 mobile phones in little over an hour.
As mobile phone theft is so prolific, critics have raised concerns that stretched police forces will not have the time to enter homes to retrieve electronic devices even if they do not have to apply for a warrant. If a stolen phone or laptop is stashed in a block of flats it will also be harder for officers to determine exactly what property it is in.
Ms Cooper added: “The police need to make sure that it's proportionate. So that will obviously be very different if you're talking about a big block of flats, and you can't tell where the property is compared to if it's clearly located in a particular house.
“But the point is to give the police those powers to do that...we've got to take action to target this, what's become an epidemic of mobile phone theft, and to make sure that the police and communities have the ability to crackdown on these kinds of crimes that just drive you up the wall.”.
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