Police say they have dismantled an international gang suspected of smuggling up to 40,000 stolen mobile phones from the UK to China in the last year. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20vlpwrzwdo
Meanwhile, British Transport Police have announced open season for criminals to steal bikes and cars parked at stations:
The higher-ups at the police clearly want Farage as next PM.
They can seemingly always spare officers to knock on doors half a dozen at a time because someone was offended by a Facebook post, yet have no time to investigate acquisitive crimes against people and businesses. Bike theft and phone theft are horrible events for the victims.
I regularly review CCTV at work. It would take about five minutes to find when a bike was stolen on a 10-hour digital tape, if I knew at what time it had been parked and had a description of the owner and/or the bike.
Devil's Advocate on this: this news story entirely backs up the police's approach. If they had every constable chasing down every phone nicked in London, they'd never get anywhere given the scale of the issue, and the time spent on sexual assaults etc etc would have to fall.
Instead, some smart officer has noted that this particular phone is in a big warehouse, and that it's in a large parcel heading overseas. They've allocated resources including forensics (usually tied up in much nastier stuff) and with only a small team smashed a huge gang and disrupted 40% of phone thefts in London.
We know anecdotally that it's the same with bike theft - I've even narrowed it down to a particular industrial estate in Edinburgh. Let's hope the police take the same approach there.
Up to a point. It looks like the police have broken up a significant smuggling operation. What they have not done is arrest any of the people actually stealing the phones in the first place, and it is hard to be sure how those thieves will react to a loss of a large part of the market.
It’s stamping in a puddle.
The competition in the backend-to-mobile-theft will take up the slack in a short period of time.
The supply of stolen phones is there, and the demand for them at the far end is still there. Nature abhors a vacuum and all that.
Police say they have dismantled an international gang suspected of smuggling up to 40,000 stolen mobile phones from the UK to China in the last year. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c20vlpwrzwdo
Meanwhile, British Transport Police have announced open season for criminals to steal bikes and cars parked at stations:
The higher-ups at the police clearly want Farage as next PM.
They can seemingly always spare officers to knock on doors half a dozen at a time because someone was offended by a Facebook post, yet have no time to investigate acquisitive crimes against people and businesses. Bike theft and phone theft are horrible events for the victims.
I regularly review CCTV at work. It would take about five minutes to find when a bike was stolen on a 10-hour digital tape, if I knew at what time it had been parked and had a description of the owner and/or the bike.
Devil's Advocate on this: this news story entirely backs up the police's approach. If they had every constable chasing down every phone nicked in London, they'd never get anywhere given the scale of the issue, and the time spent on sexual assaults etc etc would have to fall.
Instead, some smart officer has noted that this particular phone is in a big warehouse, and that it's in a large parcel heading overseas. They've allocated resources including forensics (usually tied up in much nastier stuff) and with only a small team smashed a huge gang and disrupted 40% of phone thefts in London.
We know anecdotally that it's the same with bike theft - I've even narrowed it down to a particular industrial estate in Edinburgh. Let's hope the police take the same approach there.
Up to a point. It looks like the police have broken up a significant smuggling operation. What they have not done is arrest any of the people actually stealing the phones in the first place, and it is hard to be sure how those thieves will react to a loss of a large part of the market.
There is limited value in capturing the small fry.
I would like to see what behavioural science that's based on.
Zero tolerance policing does work, but needs resourcing. In isolation nicking the guy who steals a handset ties up a lot of resource and he will likely be straight back on the street. Even if you stick him in prison for a few months he will come back with enhanced technique and a broader criminal network
I agree - there's definitely a need for it but I think the optimal amount isn't as much as people think.
E.g. every morning outside my local primary school there are 3 cars and a van parked on the zig zags at a zebra crossing (a pretty serious offence if one of the kids is consequently killed). The parents report it but nothing is ever done, but I bet you the police would bring a prosecution if something did happen. It would take just a couple of fines on the repeat offenders and the issue goes away.
At Foxjrs primary school the headmaster used to be outside the school every morning welcoming kids (he knew them all by name) and would politely tick off parents who hadn't parked appropriately. It worked very well by social pressure as he was enormously respected.
Why don't kids walk to school anymore?
Probably based on the locale, and school selection, rather than anything else. By me plenty still do.
The school walking topic is a very clear exposition of London vs RUK.
First, the primary schools are close by in most cases. Second, most parents either work at home or commute by public transport. Many people I know here don’t even own a car. Finally, with some exceptions, it’s relatively safe to walk because there are 20mph limits, lots of pedestrian crossings, and traffic calming measures.
Around here most children are still accompanied to school by parents until year 5 then tend to start coming and leaving alone. When it’s just round the corner though there are still plenty of parents who enjoy the social aspect of the school gates.
There are aspects of life in inner London that work really well, and the school run / commute are examples of that. There are other aspects - like attempting to drive out to the rest of the country when you live in SE London - that work less well.
“There is limited value in capturing the small fry”.
Nonsense. People with criminal intent should be excluded from society, otherwise they will likely continue to commit a multitude of other crimes. For this particular crime, many of them could be excluded through deportation.
What we are seeing is Broken Windows theory in action.
Low level crime decriminalised in the name of efficiency.
Computer security news: the Online Safety Act is, no, only joking.
Discord has announced a third-party data breach: stolen data may include names, email addresses, billing information such as payment type and the last four digits of credit cards, and – in some cases – images of government IDs provided for age verification purposes. https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/06/discord_support_data_breach/
The main achievement of the OSA in my case has been to switch on the inbuilt free VPN in my web-browser (Opera) after I discovered that:
1) Bible Gateway (a really useful Christian resource which has online just about every English bible translation every made) has implemented geo-location blocking of the UK
2) Imgur having implemented geo-location blocking has broken lots fairly obscure technical forums. In my particular case I was trying to find suggestions for implementing hardware watchdog circuitry for crash protection of a GPIO output from a Raspberry PI (I'm using one that reads some K type thermocouple probes as a thermostat on a 1200deg C plate oven at work - a software crash leaving the heating output on could result in an overtemp event that wrecks the oven) but it's quite a problem in forums covering everything from gaming to classic cars.
As with leaving the ECHR, the Conservative Party is responding to a series of right-wing social media talking points with proposals that will have very little impact on people’s lives and their day-to-day problems. None of this is going to reduce NHS waiting lists or help with the cost of living or boost productivity. The Conservatives need to get serious again.
Government is a bit bigger than the NHS waiting lists and productivity.
As with leaving the ECHR, the Conservative Party is responding to a series of right-wing social media talking points with proposals that will have very little impact on people’s lives and their day-to-day problems. None of this is going to reduce NHS waiting lists or help with the cost of living or boost productivity. The Conservatives need to get serious again.
But how?
As any membership organisation shrinks, it become more concentrated on the most active activists who talk more to each other and less to anyone else. All those people who only joined the Conservatives to find the right sort of marriage partner may not have done much, but they did provide informal intelligence on what people who didn't think too much about politics were like.
The Tories need to stop aping the MAGA right radicals and actually start being conservative. The problem is that the vaguely aware -Mitchell, Hunt- either cannot or will not deal with the self serving -Jenrick- or the stupid-Stride.
The Parliamentary party has too few people who understand the problem. The result is witless radicalism. The Tories have always had the Alan B'stard wing of performance cruelty, and now that is nearly all they have left. The Tory Party in its senile dotage has no big idea, has no Selsdon man or Keith Joseph ideological flame. It just has a Pavlovian authoritarianism, and after 14 years of abject failure they can no longer renew themselves.
This conference, from gimmicky, illiterate policies to "Britian" chocholate bars, has been at best farcial at times even pitiable. It just seems like all we are waiting for is the death notice.
The break up of the fundamental coalition of the Conservatives wouldn't matter if there was not the threat that Reform could win under FPTP. Having fought FPTP all my life, I do not underestimate its strength, and still believe that Farage will not get his epochal victory, either with or without the Tories, but after Starmer's phyrric victory of 2024, the electorate is in a mean mood. PR needs to come as soon as possible.
Comments
The competition in the backend-to-mobile-theft will take up the slack in a short period of time.
The supply of stolen phones is there, and the demand for them at the far end is still there. Nature abhors a vacuum and all that.
NEW THREAD
First, the primary schools are close by in most cases. Second, most parents either work at home or commute by public transport. Many people I know here don’t even own a car. Finally, with some exceptions, it’s relatively safe to walk because there are 20mph limits, lots of pedestrian crossings, and traffic calming measures.
Around here most children are still accompanied to school by parents until year 5 then tend to start coming and leaving alone. When it’s just round the corner though there are still plenty of parents who enjoy the social aspect of the school gates.
There are aspects of life in inner London that work really well, and the school run / commute are examples of that. There are other aspects - like attempting to drive out to the rest of the country when you live in SE London - that work less well.
Low level crime decriminalised in the name of efficiency.
1) Bible Gateway (a really useful Christian resource which has online just about every English bible translation every made) has implemented geo-location blocking of the UK
2) Imgur having implemented geo-location blocking has broken lots fairly obscure technical forums. In my particular case I was trying to find suggestions for implementing hardware watchdog circuitry for crash protection of a GPIO output from a Raspberry PI (I'm using one that reads some K type thermocouple probes as a thermostat on a 1200deg C plate oven at work - a software crash leaving the heating output on could result in an overtemp event that wrecks the oven) but it's quite a problem in forums covering everything from gaming to classic cars.
But clearly I'm being kept suitably safe.
The Parliamentary party has too few people who understand the problem. The result is witless radicalism. The Tories have always had the Alan B'stard wing of performance cruelty, and now that is nearly all they have left. The Tory Party in its senile dotage has no big idea, has no Selsdon man or Keith Joseph ideological flame. It just has a Pavlovian authoritarianism, and after 14 years of abject failure they can no longer renew themselves.
This conference, from gimmicky, illiterate policies to "Britian" chocholate bars, has been at best farcial at times even pitiable. It just seems like all we are waiting for is the death notice.
The break up of the fundamental coalition of the Conservatives wouldn't matter if there was not the threat that Reform could win under FPTP. Having fought FPTP all my life, I do not underestimate its strength, and still believe that Farage will not get his epochal victory, either with or without the Tories, but after Starmer's phyrric victory of 2024, the electorate is in a mean mood. PR needs to come as soon as possible.