Episode 1 Caught Red Handed

Thieves will steal our cars, our valuables,

just about anything they can get their hands on.

To cut down on crime and antisocial behaviour,

the police are using new tactics and technology

where the bad guys are getting caught in the act.

I can see the man actually commit the robbery. Lovely, thank you very much.

Local councils, shops and businesses are laying some traps of their own.

Why should we feel frightened for the rest of our lives?

And the general public too

can help unsuspecting crooks get their comeuppance.

No way are you getting away.

We did it for everyone else as well that she might be stealing from.

We will name and shame you.

-So, anyone who's up to no good...

-POLICE!

..had better think twice.

They might just get caught red-handed.

Today...

Fire and rescue, where's the emergency?

Firefighters join forces with council CCTV camera operators

to set an ingenious trap to catch a phantom phone caller.

Also today, they call it Operation Narnia.

The lion, the snitch and the wardrobe.

A family turn to a technological teddy bear

to catch a callous carer stealing money from their grandmother.

She was in a position of trust, you know.

We wanted her on the property to help Mum

and we assumed that's what she was doing.

And...it's "bin" framed.

The intriguing case of the bottomless bin

that keeps on filling.

We're going to hear an actual 999 call to the fire service.

But it's from someone who doesn't need their help.

-OPERATOR:

-'Fire and rescue, where's the emergency?'

'Yeah, what's the problem there?'

'What, as in a lorry or...?'

It sounds serious but this call is, in fact, a hoax.

'Right.'

When the fire trucks and an ambulance arrive at the bus depot,

they find no driver, no tanker and no fire at all.

And this is not the first time this hoax caller has struck.

Hoax calls cost lives. They tie up our pumps

attending incidents where we're not genuinely required,

which means we don't have the resources

to deal with incidents where we are required. Also, it's dangerous

because our fire engines drive at high speeds sometimes through

built-up areas putting our crews and the public in danger.

All hoax calls are costly and dangerous,

but this caller is a persistent pest.

So much so that the fire service has called in

the council's CCTV surveillance team.

They've asked them to divert their cameras to catch a man

who's been a problem for the emergency services

for several years.

Fire and rescue, where's the emergency?

Fire station commander Paul Macdonald is the first

to get an inkling that something's wrong.

It was around last summer.

I was going through the incident log

and I noticed two very specific false alarms.

One of the calls was a lorry with cylinders on fire

and the other one was a lorry had crashed into a bus stop.

Both contained so much detail, which I thought was unusual.

So that's why I flagged it up.

Paul tells the officer in charge

at the Services' Command and Control Centre,

which receives the area's emergency fire calls,

that this is something worth keeping any eye on.

A few months on, a familiar voice rings up

with another apparently serious call.

EMERGENCY SERVICES OPERATOR: Right, OK.

Once again, when three emergency services rush to the scene,

this turns out to be completely false information.

It was repeating the same pattern, very specific,

and we realised that we had the beginnings of a problem.

A search through fire control's database and recorded calls

helped them check every false alarm over the last five years.

And they find the problem is larger than they ever could have imagined.

He called us 28 times over a period of four years.

I've never known anyone as prolific as that before.

He never called from the same phone box twice in a row.

He would move towns and move phone boxes.

But there is one particular payphone he has used more than others -

the one at Linton Parade.

This is the phone box that he used 11 times over four years.

We knew there was a good chance of getting him,

because there is a CCTV camera over there covering this area.

And, soon after, another aggravating hoax call comes in,

sending fire crews from Paul's station to the A10 road.

To make matters worse, answering this call prevents them

attending a serious crash on the M25.

Seeing the offending call comes

once again from the Linton Parade phone box,

Paul contacts the council's CCTV control room

to see if their camera has picked anything up.

Shortly after 2:10am,

and just before the hoax call is about to be made,

a car pulls up at the Linton Parade.

We couldn't identify the car -

the shape of if is very generic.

Although there was a lot of opinions of everyone who saw this,

we couldn't conclusively say which car it is.

A man gets out of the car, he goes toward the phone box

but stops when he sees another man in a hoodie approaching.

The man then nonchalantly waits.

When the guy has gone past the corner,

this is when he walks to the kiosk, just out of shot on the right,

and makes the call.

A couple of minutes later, after finishing his false emergency call,

the man gets back in his car and drives off at speed.

It was interesting to see him get out of the car,

it wasn't somebody just randomly coming out of a pub,

but it was somebody who had driven deliberately to that phone box.

These pictures are handed over to the police,

but for PC Sarah Ashworth, the footage is frustrating.

Unfortunately, the CCTV wasn't of a good enough quality for us

to be able to make him out

or even the make and model of the car,

never mind the index plate on it.

Paul knows that the only way they are going to stop the man

is to catch him at the exact time he's making the bogus call

so that better pictures can be shot.

He needs the help of the camera operators

working around the clock in the council's CCTV control room.

They wanted us to keep a close eye on a telephone kiosk

and, if anybody acted suspicious, for us to call the police.

It was a bit of a manhunt,

and all my team were desperate to catch this guy,

due to the fact he was causing so much disruption to the Fire Service.

But as vigilant as they are,

the operators can't just focus on one phone box

24 hours a day for weeks.

They will need to be tipped off

when the serial hoaxer is thought to be there.

As we'll see shortly, Paul has more work to do before the trap is set.

It's not just the police

and officials who are using cameras to catch wrongdoers -

surveillance technology is becoming more user-friendly

and cheaper every year,

which means more people like us are turning into amateur sleuths.

This carer has recently arrived for her usual shift

to look after an elderly lady.

She starts doing her duties while chatting with a woman

and her husband in the next room.

Everything appears to be normal,

but this carer is about to betray their trust.

She opens the wardrobe, but she's not putting anything away.

She's getting something out for herself.

Money.

We were really angry, as you can imagine, really angry.

I mean, I'm a police officer, we see this sort of thing day-in-day-out,

it's what we deal with quite a lot.

But when it happens to a member of your own family,

it's just sickening. It's not a nice feeling.

These pictures were recorded at the home of 81-year-old Margaret.

Her family feel she and her husband are too frail

to be filmed by our cameras.

But they want the story of what happened to her to be told.

Margaret needs regular help,

which is provided by several carers and her relatives,

including her daughter, Lindsey, and her grandchildren, Kirstie and Scott.

Mum has got liver and kidney disease.

She is unable to move around as much as she could, around the property,

and she just needs somebody to help with her personal care, really.

Mentally, she is as bright as a button.

But her physical health is really quite bad.

As a family, we try and pull together, and we all try

and do what needs to be done.

It's just manifested in needing carers three times a day.

But over time, it becomes clear there is something wrong.

Mum was saying that the pension wasn't lasting as long as it should,

and she thought it was the cost of living that was rising.

But we were unsure because we get the shopping,

we give her the receipts.

Then I caught the tail end of a conversation that my parents

were having about how much money was in Mum's purse.

Bearing in mind that Dad had only fetched the pension

the day before, and this is Tuesday evening,

obviously something was wrong because we fetched no shopping that day.

Lindsey checks the carers' rota to see who was on duty for that day.

This leads them to believe it could only be one person.

Although she was one of the younger carers, there was

no real reason to mistrust her, she was in a position of trust, we wanted

her on the property to help Mum and we assumed that's what she was doing.

Yeah, it came as quite a shock.

Unsure what to do, Lindsey could at least call

on some expertise within the family.

Fortunately for us, my niece is a police officer.

She turned up on the doorstep in tears,

and out tumbled this story about the carers stealing from Grandma.

I was so angry, beyond belief. And Kirstie was as well.

And upset that somebody could do it to Mum.

A family conference is held where Kirstie outlines a plan.

We needed evidence to support what my auntie suspected.

I know that in cases in the past,

the carer would have been arrested, she would have been spoken to,

interviewed on tape as with all cases.

Unfortunately, without the evidence to support that, it was

unlikely to go very far.

Kirstie advised us to do three things.

One of them was to write down all the serial numbers of the notes

that were in Mum's purse. Then she advised that we get some smart water.

It's basically microscopic bar codes that are forensically linked

back to the person who has bought the dye.

When a property is stolen, it can then be traced back

to its original owner by the use of ultraviolet light.

But the best evidence would be to catch the carer in the act.

The third thing was to set the camera up.

But first, Lindsey's mum needs convincing.

She likes to see the good in everybody

and she didn't want to think that anybody would be doing it.

I said to her, if we do the camera, at least then we will know.

And we did it for everyone else as well, that she may be stealing from.

Lindsey buys a camera, small enough for a cameraman called Teddy.

Mum keeps her money overnight in a wardrobe.

The little teddy just happened to be sitting on the corner

of the shelf towards the wardrobe.

So, the camera is set up, the banknotes are marked

and the numbers noted.

We called the whole thing Operation Narnia, just to lighten it

a little bit, because Mum was getting a little bit anxious about things.

With the camera switched on, Operation Narnia is up

and running when the suspected carer arrives for her next shift.

It is a difficult few hours for Scott's grandparents.

We had to have it going on in a room away from them

whilst they knew it was actually happening.

To actually be aware of that,

and to know someone is in your house doing that and to not say

anything, it is not the sort of thing you need at that age.

When the carer leaves after finishing her shift,

-Lindsey and her sister go in to find...

-Two £20 notes missing.

Time to check the Teddy Cam.

Mum insisted on coming in to watch it as well, and Dad.

So the four of us were sitting in the bedroom.

We played the tape back, and it didn't make for very nice viewing.

After a period of time working

and exchanging pleasantries with Margaret and her husband,

the camera shows that the carer heads to the bedroom and opens the wardrobe.

We will soon see what she is after.

She plucks a purse out of Margaret's handbag,

opens it and goes through it.

Finally, she puts it back where she found it and leaves.

But not before she turns to face the camera as she calmly pockets

the £20 notes she has pinched.

The family would have found it incredibly difficult to prove

the crime took place without the evidence from the camera.

The fact that she only opens the right-hand door.

-She knew where it was, didn't she?

-She knows exactly what she is doing.

It was quite a bizarre set of emotions.

We were really, really happy that she had been caught, but also,

to know that we were right, and it had been going on

to an extent under all of our noses was also quite a bad feeling.

It still makes your tummy roll, doesn't it?

I'm a police officer and I deal with things like this day in

and day out, it is something we deal with quite often.

I always try to be empathetic, sympathetic.

But when it happens to members of your own family, it throws

all of that out of the water completely, it is quite different.

She's not frightened or anything. My heart would have been...

But this carer's heart rate is about to go up.

I rang the police.

They came and watched the footage, and I think within

two and a half hours, they had arrested her.

At court, the carer admits to stealing £40 from Margaret.

The fact that she is on bail for a previous theft

is taken into account.

And she is jailed for 13 months.

I am pleased that she was convicted.

I think it needs to be made quite a strong point of that obviously

this shouldn't be happening. They are vulnerable members of society.

I hope that she learns something from it and reforms,

but I feel like our family have spent too much time talking about her.

We just need to get closure now.

Put it behind us,

then we can move on and talk to Mum about nice things.

Coming up on Caught Red Handed...

-A load of old rubbish and a whole load more.

-We couldn't believe it.

We looked at it and we were shocked.

The rubbish bin that keeps on giving.

Fire and Rescue, where's the emergency?

Earlier, we heard the voice of a persistent hoaxer

who has kept calling out the Hertfordshire Fire Service.

Station Commander Paul Macdonald is determined to stop him.

A phone box man regularly uses is in range of the council's

hi tech CCTV control centre.

They normally keep a general eye on the town,

but now they are crucial to help Paul catch the offender.

But the camera operators would need to be tipped off

when he is on the phone.

Paul needs to help 999 call takers to recognise the hoaxer's voice

and speech patterns -

no easy task when they receive around 1,900 calls a month.

Fire and Rescue, where's the emergency?

He would repeat phrases at the start, saying things like,

"Well, what it is..."

And then he would elaborate a story.

'What it is...'

'What it is...'

'What it is...'

Then he was giving us further details as well, just to embellish

the story, to make it sound quite realistic.

'Near a block of flats, it's not affecting it at all, no?'

'Not at the moment, but it is right near some railway lines as well.'

And then, right at the end of the call, he would add an extra element to it.

He would say things like, "I don't know

"if there are explosives in there."

'I don't know if, like, there are any gas cylinders or anything in it.'

Things like that that would actually get a bigger attendance

and entail all three emergency services.

But some months later,

all this research into the mystery man's methods is about to pay off.

Late one Friday night, Stephen Munn is on duty when he gets a call.

Fire and Rescue, where's the emergency?

He started the conversation with, "Well, what it is is..."

And then proceeded to give us details of an incident there.

Due to the location and the way that he was speaking to me,

I recognised him quite early on in the call.

I signalled to one of my colleagues, and she called the police,

who also contacted the CCTV control room.

In just under two minutes,

the camera operator at the CCTV control room spins

the camera at Linton Parade around

and zooms in on the man that is currently on the phone to Stephen.

It was important to keep him

on the line as long as possible. So I started

asking him more questions about the incident.

The irony is

that Stephen still has to despatch fire crews to the location

the caller was describing,

just in case there is a slim chance he's telling the truth.

Their sirens can be heard in the background.

The man suddenly seems keen to get off the phone.

The man is going to leave before the police can get there.

But he doesn't realise that his every move is being filmed.

We've got such fantastic cameras, I think

the man in question thought he'd got away with it,

but my operator zoomed in on the number plate

and passed all the information over to the police.

Number plate noted, now police officer Sarah

has all the information she needs

to get her man.

The vehicle was registered to a company,

but that didn't give us a name.

We found that that vehicle had gone through

a speed camera some months ago.

We were able to find a photo off them

and compared their photo to the CCTV we had.

And then we knew who we were looking for.

The man is arrested at his home address.

He did seem quite shocked and surprised that we were there.

And then he was interviewed later on,

and again admitted he was the person making the calls,

and did appear to show some remorse for his actions.

Pleading guilty at court and showing remorse, the man is fined

and receives a Community Order banning him from making hoax calls.

If breached, he'll far more serious consequences.

This CCTV camera, in the right pace at the right time,

has helped bring to an end a four year nuisance.

There was definitely a sense of satisfaction when he was caught,

because without catching him he would have just carried on

until we had, maybe for another four years.

He'd been giving us the run-around,

so it was a real relief to have finally caught him.

Some people are wary of CCTV,

saying it's like Big Brother.

But in this case, it's not a matter of Big Brother watching us,

but watching THEM.

Offenders like the hoaxer.

CCTV is there to keep you safe.

If you're a law-abiding member of the public,

99.9% of the time,

the CCTV won't even notice that you're there.

But if, unfortunately, you do become a victim of crime,

it can help us catch criminals and put them behind bars.

I make a plea to those people who do misuse the 999 system.

If it was your member of the family

who urgently needed our assistance,

where would you want us to be?

It's not clear what twisted motives

led the Hertfordshire hoaxer to wantonly waste

the vital work of the emergency services.

But at least, thanks to cameras and skilled detective work,

one persistent offender has hung up the phone for good.

On Caught Red Handed,

we see a lot of people taking things that don't belong to them.

This next problem isn't about what they're taking -

it's about what they're leaving behind.

Summer time in Cambridge.

This grocery store is run by Ifitikhar and his family.

I'm here about nine and a half years,

and the past few years business is not good, you know?

So I am diversifying, going in to hot food takeaway.

Ifitikhar's shop and takeaway

generates a lot of rubbish and packaging

which would soon build up if it wasn't regularly disposed of.

As you can see, we've got bin here, it's the start of the day,

and later on, as it goes along, we are filling it up

and we try to squeeze as well,

as much as we can, and keep it under control.

Ifitikhar's shares his large wheelie bin with a Chinese Restaurant,

which also has its own separate bin.

Neither business likes its left-overs

to be left around for too long.

Because food... So you can imagine what happens.

Rats, bugs...and anything.

Flies...

Which is why they pay for a commercial waste removal

service run by Cambridge Council.

Every time they empty the bin, then we have to pay £13 plus VAT.

One morning, Ifitikhar gets to work to find his bins not only still full

but more overloaded than he's ever seen it before.

I look at the bin... Bloody hell, it's so full.

I mean, we don't leave it like that.

And the usual harmonious bin-sharing relationship

with his neighbour from the Chinese restaurant was put to the test.

Mr Wong came to me, half 11, he thought my staff did that.

And I thought, when I saw it in the morning, they did like that.

And then we thought, let's see what's happening, let's check CCTV,

and when we rewound it, guess what we found?

Ifitikhar set his camera system up originally as a security measure

to help prevent shoplifting and vandalism.

This time, it caught an entirely different sort of misbehaving.

At almost 7am, a refuse collector turns up,

seemingly to take the rubbish away.

But instead, he starts to rummage about in it.

Plumping it up nicely.

A colleague joins him.

Then, for some reason, he gets out a camera to take photos.

It's true - Ifitikhar's bin was certainly full,

but now it's really overloaded.

And after a quick discussion,

the second man starts to stack the large bin up even more.

Perhaps they're kindly going to take away as much as they can manage?

He even puts a bag on it, the cherry on the top.

But no, the only thing they take is another photo.

Job done, they walk off.

It's not what Ifitikhar and his neighbour, Mr Wong,

were excepting to see.

We couldn't believe it, we looked at each other, we were shocked.

Ifitikhar couldn't understand it. And, even more annoying,

they will still be charged for the disposal of the rubbish.

They could have emptied it in so much time, they could have emptied it

in the amount of time they wasted here, you see?

Ifitikhar got straight on the phone to the council.

And I was told, "Yes, sir, you know,

"we have photographic evidence that it wasn't empty because it was full,"

and then I told them, "I got CCTV evidence what your boys did here."

The council say they will look into the matter. While he's waiting,

Ifitikhar does a bit of looking into it himself, at past CCTV recordings.

And unzips lots of goings on.

I see the binman coming, he is opening his zip,

and then he goes behind the bin and do wee there.

The man has bin and gone all over

the concrete at the back of the shops.

And it's no the only occasion.

Another day, another gentleman doing the same thing.

The people who should leave it clean are leaving things behind.

Maybe they need a loo behind the lorries?

HE LAUGHS

Om another previous day, the CCTV camera also witnessed

the refuse collectors overloading the bin again.

Only, this time, they were happy to take it,

to save themselves the trouble of emptying both bins.

If they can do that, why couldn't he take it that time?

Not hearing anything from the council for a few days,

Ifitikhar writes a letter and hands over the video of the bin incident.

He also send it to the local newspaper.

The council quickly responds.

After that the did best, they apologised to me,

and they told me they will do a proper enquiry,

and whatever the outcome, they will let us know.

And I'm happy about it.

Council response? I'm satisfied, I'm happy.

With the matter of the waste matter now closed,

Ifitikhar can now concentrate on expanding his own takeaway service.

Mind you, looking at that lovely grub, I doubt

-if his customers will complain if

-he

-piles a bit of extra on top.

Join us next time, when more wrongdoers get Caught Red Handed.