“The mayor is supporting the Met with record funding to redouble efforts to tackle the scourge of phone thefts, with increased police patrols and plain-clothed operations in hotspot areas, including the West End and Westminster, where nearly 40 per cent of phone thefts occur.
A spokesman for Sir Sadiq said: “Thanks to the hard work of the police and intervention work led by London’s Violence Reduction Unit, personal robbery is down 13 per cent in the capital compared to the same period last year.
The Tory report, ‘Tackling London’s Theft Epidemic’, calls on the mayor to allocate £7m of ringfenced funding for the creation of a dedicated Theft Reduction Unit, with specifically recruited officers able to “concentrate their resources solely on organised crime groups”.
Some 56 per cent believed that London is less safe now than it was ten years ago, with just 5 per cent of respondents believing that London is now safer.
In the year to September 2024 - the most recent 12-month period for which data is available - the national figure had risen by only 3 per cent to reach almost 1.81m, whereas the London-specific figure had jumped 33 per cent to reach 477,000.
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