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Det Sgt Heather Pilkington (left) arrests an alleged 17-year-old car thief on Monday |
Police in high-speed, high-risk op to stamp out moped crime gangs
Unprecedented use of pursuit teams challenges scooter criminals on their own terms
A HIGH-SPEED, high-risk, game of cat-and-mouse played out across the borough’s streets this week as police adopted new tactics to grapple the growing threat of moped criminals – in an operation observed by the New Journal.
Stung into action by scooter gangs who know that health and safety rules normally prevent high-speed police chases, detectives authorised the unprecedented use of motorcycle pursuit teams to follow mopeds where squad cars cannot go.
“Too many of the faces suspected of robbery, drug-dealing and burglary are using scooters,” said Sgt Peter Ryan, as he drove the operation’s support car through the narrow streets behind the Torriano estate in Kentish Town on Monday. “Serious robberies and attacks on cash-in-transits are being committed with no fear of being caught. Some of them are the same people causing noise trouble for residents on estates – they start socially but can end up robbing jewellers in Hatton Garden.”
Out in front, a police motorbike nosed through the estate’s alleys, seeking dumped mopeds or the highest prize – one of the borough’s known scooter-riding suspects, officially known as ‘prominent nominals’ or ‘promnoms’.
Although they probed through the Rowley Way estate in Kilburn and the Peckwater, Ingestre Road, Denton and Oak Village estates around Kentish Town and Gospel Oak – where according to police, loosely-linked scooter ‘gangs’ gather, often sharing a pool of mopeds which are tuned and modified for maximum performance and noise – their first result came in York Way, where five suspected car thieves had abandoned a red Vauxhall Corsa and fled into the York Way estate. Two of the fugitives – both teenaged ‘promnoms’ – were arrested after a chase in Marquis Road, near Agar Grove.
The tactics, dubbed Operation Edge, were overseen by Kentish Town detective sergeant Heather Pilkington, charged by the borough’s top brass with cracking down on vehicle break-ins – currently the highest in London. She said: “The aim is to target those youths who are using two-wheeled vehicles in order to commit crime – either by stealing them or using them to make getaways. We also want to make the bikes they’re riding themselves safe – or take them off the streets.”
The threat of moped gangs was highlighted last week when a 17-year-old youth was sentenced to four years for a robbery that left Camden Town art student Jane Gauntlett with brain damage after she was forced off her bicycle by scooters on February 3.
Alexander Sztorc, from Harrow Road, had robbed another woman in Finchley Road earlier that day- and was only caught after crashing into another scooter in Camden Town.
The potential for tragedy in moped culture was also underlined when Kentish Town father of two Scott Laird, 22, known as the ‘wheley man’, died in a moped accident in Brecknock Road in August.
But although by yesterday (Wednesday) the team had made eleven arrests and seized two mini-mopeds, the tactics – relying heavily on controversial stop and search – found critics on the streets.
“Who are they stopping? Are they stopping people like you or people like me?” asked a black teenager, who cannot be named as police carried out a search of him and four friends in Leighton Road on Monday. “We know who they stop – they will stop us again tomorrow and again next week though they have found nothing. If they stopped anyone else I wouldn’t mind.” Police said the car he was in contained two ‘promnoms’ suspected of links to robbery.
Officers also admitted that when the two-week operation, timed for half-term, was over, the near impunity enjoyed by moped riders would return because the necessary combination of pursuit-trained drivers and authorised pursuit cars would be broken up. |
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