More recently, there were further reports of door mirror theft in Amsterdam, while earlier this year, Surrey police noticed that the car crime was “on the rise across the UK”, although no data was offered. Similarly, there were headlines a few years ago about headlight theft, sometimes called ‘eye-snatching’. It’s a similar issue – while pictures of cars, including a Porsche Taycan with its lamps brutally sliced out of the bodywork, made for striking, viral images, it’s hard to know how common such crimes are.
However, the results of a Freedom of Information request made to the Metropolitan Police in 2024 gives some insight into what you really need to worry about. Covering 2019 through to early 2024, the released data shows ‘Motor vehicle parts stolen/taken in Theft from Motor Vehicle offences’ for each London Borough, broken down into the type of component stolen.
Although there’s some variation by region and borough, number plates were the most commonly stolen part. Catalytic converter thefts exceeded the number of registration plate thefts for some boroughs in some years, tapering dramatically towards 2024, tallying with an exclusive Auto Express report from last year that showed a 98 per cent reduction in thefts. At the time, the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) cited a number of factors, including forensic marking and the creation of a national database to register and track the stolen parts.
In the 2024 FOI request, there isn’t a specific field for door mirror theft, with such crimes forming part of an ‘other MV [motor vehicle] Parts/Access[ories]’ entry. In Kensington and Chelsea in 2024, there were 76 reports of registration plate thefts, five catalytic converters, one sat-nav system, and 48 in the ‘other’ category.
Registration plates are hot property because it’s easy to put them on another vehicle to disguise its identity from ANPR and speed cameras. The rest of a car’s components, meanwhile, are often of more interest to criminals than the vehicles themselves.
Only last week, the NPCC reported that week-long operations across the country had closed down eight ‘chop shops’ where stolen cars are stripped of parts, with 18 arrests linked to the sites.
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