Westminster phone snatching crackdown: 187 arrests

A Metropolitan Police operation against thieves who use e-bikes and mopeds to snatch phones in Westminster has made 187 arrests. Officers also seized 157 vehicles.

The Met announced the results on 10 September. The operation ran from February to July.

How the operation worked

Plain-clothed and uniformed officers patrolled hotspot areas where the Met says thieves are known to use mopeds or e-bikes. They stopped people known to police, or linked to earlier incidents.

According to the force:

• specialist officers could act immediately if a theft happened in front of them
• trained riders followed stolen phones using tracking data, including through busy and pedestrianised streets
• the 187 arrests covered possession of dangerous weapons, drug offences, and robbery and theft offences
• the Met’s fleet of high-powered Sur-Ron e-bikes has grown from five to 25

One of the examples the Met gave was in Soho. Officers on patrol approached a 23-year-old man who ran off, and the force says he allegedly dropped a knife during the chase. He was arrested for possession of an offensive weapon and bailed until October.

Detective Superintendent Gareth Gilbert led the operation. “Through targeted operations like this, we are staying one step ahead of the criminals who use high-powered bikes or mopeds to steal from Londoners,” he said.

The Met gave no Westminster figure for the fall

The force’s statement says e-bike related crime fell by 22% during the operation. That figure is for Lambeth and Southwark and for hubs including Waterloo and London Bridge. It is not a figure for Westminster, and the statement does not give one.

So we counted. The Home Office’s street-level crime data records every offence the police log, mapped to an approximate location. We added up the offences recorded inside the City of Westminster boundary for the same six months, February to July, in 2025 and 2026.

Theft from the person is the category a phone snatched from a hand or a pocket falls into. It almost halved.

Why the fall cannot all be put down to the operation

The drop was already there before the operation began. In January 2026, the month before it started, Westminster recorded 1,619 thefts from the person. In January 2025 it was 2,790, so the fall was already 42%.

Robbery shows the same pattern. January 2026 had 233 robberies against 308 a year earlier, down 24%.

That fits what the Met says about London as a whole. Its statement puts the fall in theft of personal items and phones at 15.6% so far in 2026, and robbery at 12.8%. Westminster’s fall is much steeper than either figure.

Possession of weapons went the other way, from 136 offences to 230. That is not necessarily a sign of more knives on the street. A weapons possession offence is normally recorded when police find the weapon, so the count tends to rise when more officers are out stopping people, as they were here. The monthly count jumped from 22 in March to 51 in April and stayed at 38 or more through July.

What it means for you

• Phone snatching in Westminster is recorded far less often than a year ago, but it still ran at more than 1,000 offences a month in June and July. That is about 34 a day.
• Report a theft with the phone’s tracking details. The Met says its riders followed stolen phones using tracking data. Report online at met.police.uk or call 101. In an emergency, or if the thief is still nearby, call 999.
• The illegal e-bikes are a separate target. The Met says it has seized more than 2,500 illegal e-bikes and e-scooters across London so far this year. Legal hire bikes and scooters are a different matter, covered in our stories on the dockless bike deal and the e-scooter trial.

How we counted

Figures are from the data.police.uk street-crime API, queried against the Office for National Statistics boundary for the City of Westminster for each month from January to July in 2025 and 2026. Police.uk moves each offence to a nearby anonymised map point, so a small number near the borough edge may fall on the wrong side of it. The same method was used for both years. July 2026 is the latest month published.

Sources

• Metropolitan Police: More than 185 arrested in Met crackdown on robbery and theft in central London, 10 September 2026, for the 187 arrests, 157 vehicles, the operation’s dates and methods, the Soho arrest, the 22% figure and where it applies, the Sur-Ron fleet, the 2,500 seized e-bikes and e-scooters, the London-wide falls and the quote.
• data.police.uk street-level crime data, for every Westminster offence count, January to July 2025 and 2026.
• ONS Local Authority Districts boundaries, December 2024, for the City of Westminster boundary used in the count.