Episode 12 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,

police and other agencies are using new technology

and tactics where the bad guys are actually getting caught in the act.

I can see the man 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 they might be stealing from.

We will name and shame you.

So anyone's who's up to no good had better think twice.

They might just get caught red handed.

Today, it's a terrifying sight.

An elderly woman sleeps in a chair

while a burglar creeps towards her.

And what happens next is quite frightening.

Frightening for the burglar, that is.

That's him running for cover,

being chased by the woman with her walking stick.

Also today, a hi-tech operation by police in Cornwall

as they take on two gangs of drug dealers.

My objective was to permanently disrupt and dismantle these gangs.

And he certainly does.

With over 100 years of prison sentences between them.

And a burglar in a sandwich shop.

What he thought was a bread-and-butter job

comes crashing down around him.

Ah, you clever boy.

Ah, you're a clever boy, aren't you?

But first, how Margaret, a 67-year-old woman,

who finds it difficult to get about

came face-to-face with something we all fear.

An intruder in the night.

It's the early hours of the morning

and Margaret is asleep in her armchair.

Just like a bad dream come true, a shadowy figure creeps into view.

But this is no nightmare. This man is very real.

And he is here to steal money.

At one stage, he gets very close to Margaret.

But this burglar doesn't realise two things.

That his every move is being recorded by two cameras

and that Margaret has sensed his looming presence.

Though she's scared, she's got her wits about her

and she's bravely working out what her options are.

The town of Long Eaton

on the borders of Nottingham and Derbyshire.

Margaret moved to her ground-floor flat here 13 years ago

when debilitating illness made it difficult for her to cope with stairs.

I've got arthritis in both knees and I've got arthritis in my spine.

And I've got chronic venous dermatitis in both legs.

There's a clever boy!

Margaret has Elvis the budgie for company.

And there are regular visits from neighbours and friends,

like Michelle, who help out.

I've known Margaret roughly seven to eight years. She is a lovely lady.

Very sweet, very kind. She does get out and meet people.

She plays dominoes and things like that with friends.

I've always felt safe in this flat

and around this area until this happened.

What changed Margaret's feeling of safety was one particular day

when she suspected that some money had gone missing.

She had been to the bank to withdraw £200 in order to pay her bills.

It was the next morning. I looked in my bag, my purse was missing.

Margaret calls Michelle and they search high and low for it.

I've mislaid it or put it somewhere I shouldn't have.

Normally, it was safe. She knew where everything was.

-It's not her to lose anything.

-I thought I'd got senile dementia.

Couldn't find it, so obviously somebody had took it,

but we didn't know who and how.

Somebody had come in and pinched it.

Margaret calls the police.

They arrive to investigate,

but apart from the missing money itself,

there's no sign of a break-in.

Detective Constable Gill Richardson is part of the investigating team.

She believed some money had been taken from inside her premises.

She didn't know how they'd gained access.

And we always have to treat it as though a crime has happened

until we know to the contrary.

We offered crime prevention advice, we had people attend

and install some alarms and other crime prevention work.

Basically, we did everything we could with the police

to try and make sure she felt safe in her own house.

Even though there's now more security, both Margaret and Michelle

get an uneasy feeling around the flat.

I said, "I feel like I'm being watched, Michelle."

When I came, I was looking behind me all the time

and I was looking around to see if anybody was watching me,

see if somebody was there.

The affects of somebody being burgled can be phenomenal.

It can affect how somebody feels about living in their home,

it can affect how they feel about leaving their home.

The loss of money has also forced Margaret into financial difficulties.

I was panicking. I thought, "How am I going to pay these bills off?"

A couple of days later, the same thing happens again.

I got burgled again. My money went missing again.

And I told Michelle. I said, "My money's gone again, Michelle."

So we got the police again.

And again, it's unclear how the thief has broken in.

It is difficult.

Just because they're going back over and over again

does not make it easy to catch them.

In this case, he was very forensically aware

and so it meant that we weren't able to capture him

through DNA or fingerprints.

We were looking for other ways in which to capture him.

The police now decide to go further and install cameras.

If the burglar strikes again, they should show what he does

and hopefully who he is.

They're small cameras that are hidden discretely in an address

and have the capability to record based on things such as motion.

I was very pleased because I felt safer then that the cameras were in.

I thought, "However he's getting in, he's going to get his picture took."

The trap is set and Margaret only has to wait

a couple of nights for it to be put to use.

It's just gone 12:30am

and she's fallen asleep in front of the television.

I'm actually sleeping here because I've not long took my tablets

and once I've took my tablets, I get tired.

And then suddenly, the shocking sight of an eerie figure

creeping into the room from the direction of the bedroom.

The burglar takes Margaret's handbag

from the back of her mobility scooter.

He regularly glances at Margaret.

He's looking to see if I am sleeping. And I know I snore badly.

After rifling through the bag and stealing some money,

he carefully puts it back so it doesn't look disturbed.

He knows that there's another bag and he's looking for the other bag.

He gets very close to Margaret.

I've heard something and in my head,

I've felt it's probably the bird moving.

I heard something else and I'm saying to myself, "He's in my flat.

"He's actually in my flat."

My heart was pounding.

But I thought, "Just try to keep calm, Margaret."

Although her heart is pounding, Margaret pretends to look asleep.

But her knees fidget slightly and the burglar, sensing

she might be rousing, attempts to leave by the front door.

-But it has a police alarm on it.

-ALARM WAILS

And the alarm's going off.

And the fear had gone and the anger just took over the fear.

And I just thought, "No, you're not going to get away this time."

Because there's no way he could get out through the bedroom.

Margaret fetches her walking stick

and despite her pain, goes after the man.

I'm hurrying and I'm hurting.

I'm going, "Right, I'm going to break your kneecaps," I'm shouting.

I went into the bedroom and I just could not believe

what I saw with my own eyes.

He just, he jumped on my bed.

And it was like somebody... A gymnast.

He jumped on the bed and out through the window.

Finally, she solved the mystery

of where the burglar had been breaking in.

The window was wide open.

It was really wide open

and I thought, "How can he get it that far?"

Because the windows we've got, you can only open it so far.

Margaret's now protected against it happening again,

but to help crime prevention,

we've agreed not to reveal exactly how he got in.

All I thought was, "Oh, you've got away again."

But he hasn't got away for long.

Those two cameras have done their job. Gill's unit collect the images.

As a result of that footage being downloaded,

we created a bulletin which was distributed amongst Derbyshire Police

and a local officer was able to alert us as to who this male was.

The burglar is 51-year-old Patrick Reid. He's found and arrested.

I just burst into tears. I said, "Have they really, really got him?"

And they said, "Yes, Margaret, we've really, really got him.

"On his pushbike and everything, we've got him."

And I said, "Oh, thank God for that."

Margaret's friends hear about how she chased the creeping thief away.

I was a bit shocked because Margaret's not aggressive at all.

She's not an aggressive person. She's quite soft and kind.

And I was, like, surprised.

But I think it was the anger that took over then.

But she did it and it was OK. She didn't get hurt.

Well, she felt a bit sore for a few days, but she didn't get hurt.

And Margaret's bravery doesn't end there.

She insists on going to the court case.

One of her concerns was that although this man had broken into

her address and knew what she looked like

and knew what her house looked like, she didn't really know him

and she didn't know what he looked like.

And she was adamant that she wanted to face him at court.

Patrick Reid is found guilty

and is sentenced to four years and eight months in prison.

Taking into account the anguish Margaret's been put through

and the loss of money, the judge turns to her and says...

"Mrs Woodward, for your tremendous bravery and courage,

"I'm awarding you £1,500

"out of the Queen's and the Sheriff's coffers."

And the burglar, Patrick Reid, shouted, "but I didn't harm her!"

And the judge said, "Take him down!"

The policewoman was cuddling me, I'd got Michelle cuddling me.

And I says, "What a thing to get!"

And then I said, "I'm so proud of myself."

Ah, you're a clever boy, aren't you?

Margaret has now settled back into her flat with Elvis.

Her security has been shored up and she sleeps comfortably at night.

What Margaret did on that final occasion

that she was burgled was amazing.

Very brave, very brave.

Yeah, she's wonderful.

We all like to think that our homes are safe and secure,

but quite often there are weak points that we might not be aware of

but a burglar will exploit.

We all know about keeping our doors closed and keeping windows closed,

but what about the doors and windows at the back of the property?

You've got open just a tiny amount in order to provide

a bit of ventilation, completely understand that,

but you need to make sure that these areas are closed.

We can help stop burglars by fitting guards on letter boxes.

A criminal can look through your letter box, see the keys

and then use some kind of pole or some kind of equipment to get

hold of your keys and then they're off with your car, for example.

Christmas, birthdays, we all buy new appliances.

Think about what you do with the packaging.

If you leave it outside the front of your address for the binmen,

the likelihood is that the thief is going to see and it's going to

make your address more exciting and more attractive to them.

So, think about breaking up cardboard boxes

and putting it in the recycling bin so it's out of view.

You'd think a burglar have to be pretty sure of a good haul

to risk smashing through a glass door.

But this man isn't breaking into a bank or a jewellers -

no, just a sandwich shop.

And he almost gets sliced in the process.

It's late at night in central London.

A man is waiting outside this closed food bar,

acting casual as the traffic passes.

He's biding his time until the right moment.

He then tries the door, and finds it's locked.

Not surprising, really, seeing as the shop's closed. He heads off.

But comes back to try a new tactic. This could be key to the door.

But unfortunately for him, it's the key for another door.

He heads off again.

But there was a bit of give when he pushed the door,

so he decides to try to try his luck again with some brute force.

And, this time, smashes through.

Though not without almost being sliced by the glass.

After a health and safety adjustment,

he runs to the cash boxes to find...

they're locked, too.

He seems to have overlooked the fact that they would be.

And it takes time to register that the registers won't open.

He gives up and leaves,

only to return for one more check.

Yup - they're still locked.

When police eventually catch up with this burglar,

they show him all this CCTV footage of his botched job.

In court, he gets sentenced to six months in prison for a number

of burglaries in the area, including this one at the sandwich shop.

Hopefully when he gets out,

this doughnut will find a legal way to earn a crust.

Drug gangs are problem everywhere in the UK, not just the big cities.

But the police are developing a sophisticated system that will

detect and disrupt the syndicates.

This is a sophisticated three-year police operation

to smash two gangs of drug dealers.

With the help of technology,

detectives unravel a criminal network that spans the UK.

They use covert vehicle recognition, mobile phone tracking and CCTV.

This clip's from Liverpool.

This one is from Sunbury on Thames, and this one, Birmingham.

But the heart of this particular drug-dealing operation is

not in tough inner-city areas, but in the holiday towns of Cornwall.

If you think, perhaps, of a spider's web spiralling out,

the criminals are the centre of that web,

and as it spirals out, more and more people are becoming dragged into it.

Apart from the problem of addiction,

the drug trade is a catalyst for many types of serious crime.

The reason that person's stolen the radio out of your car, the reason

that person's mugged you in the street is to obtain money for drugs.

By tackling drug gangs,

police can lower the level of a wide range of other sorts of crime.

Cornwall - popular as a holiday destination -

is not the sort of place you would associate with criminal gangs.

I think Devon and Cornwall are no better or nor worse than any other parts of the country.

Drugs will go into these towns, will go into these cities,

and there's just as much of a problem in rural areas as there are in the big cities.

Nicholas Pearman works at a rehabilitation centre.

He helps people who have decided to come off drugs.

I see the ones that are tearful, I see the ones that

lives are unmanageable and they can't cope no more.

They come in, and I coordinate a recovery pathway

to help them get off drugs.

The reason Nicholas understands his clients

is because for 22 years he was addicted to drugs himself.

He knows only too well the link with other types of crime.

Drugs really is destroying neighbourhoods.

If I was walking down a street and I was on my way to a drug

dealer's house, and there was a laptop in a car,

the car window would've got smashed, and the laptop would've gone.

If that drug dealer didn't live in that area, possibly, no doubt,

that crime would not have happened.

While drug dealers are making their money, local people suffer.

Detective Inspector Dave Dale

from the Serious And Organised Crime Investigation Team,

or SOCIT for short, wants to SOCK IT to two drug gangs

they've discovered operating at the same time.

One is in Falmouth and the other in Newquay.

My objective was to permanently disrupt

and dismantle these gangs, to stop them operating in our area,

to make the environment hostile for them to operate in,

and to prosecute them accordingly.

They call the investigation Operation Ipanema.

They decide to tackle both gangs at the same time.

Detective Constable Chris Louca is part of the team.

Although they're quite separate geographically,

we identified that they would pool their resources together

to bring in the drugs into the County.

If we only targeted Falmouth,

we could've properly seen that Newquay would have taken over

the supply, so you had to look at both of them at the same time

to actually get a whole picture of what was going on.

To see what the whole picture is, undercover officers

and surveillance unit are sent in.

They find both groups are set up in a similar way.

The two gangs did consist of old school friends

and quite a few actually were relatives.

In Newquay there are three leaders that are identified.

Matthew Bird and the Tucker brothers, Samuel and Joseph.

On the south coast in Falmouth, they find one main leader, Roy Jones.

But he works closely with two other organisers -

Michael Dean Thom and Roy Wilks.

Under them they would have several couriers who would either be

used to ferry drugs or cash around.

The main organisers wouldn't want to get caught with the drugs on them, would they?

So they bring in others to do the dirty work.

For example, Roy Jones in Falmouth has recruited Jack Clark,

a 19-year-old, as a courier.

Basically got himself caught up with the older members of the group and

enjoyed the lifestyle that would come along with being involved with these boys.

Police pick up on one of their drug commuting trips to visit a supplier in Birmingham.

What we have here is the vehicle driven by the main Falmouth organiser,

and also contained the courier, Jack Clark.

Two hours later, after receiving the drugs,

they drive to the city centre.

They're in no hurry - as far as they're concerned, they are on a secret mission.

But actually, their every move is caught on camera.

This is driving around onto the road that leads to Birmingham New Street station.

The young courier is dropped off to catch a train. Jones stays with his car.

The reasons for this are twofold.

One, if Roy Jones gets stopped, there's no drugs on him,

he doesn't get arrested, and the second one is,

the drugs actually safely get into the county of Cornwall via the rail network undetected.

But it doesn't stay undetected for long, because...

What we have here is Jack Clark using the stairs to access the platform.

You can see he's using a mobile phone,

at this point he's sending a message to Roy Jones.

These crooks think they're smart enough to get away with it, but they're wrong.

It's their mobiles that prove to be a key factor in their capture.

Mobile phone work really does form

what we call the glue of the investigation.

This is how it works:

From Jack Clark's phone, police map out when he made phone calls,

where he made them, and to whom.

From that information, they gather CCTV evidence

from cameras at locations where Jack Clark visits.

Jack's telephone calls are plotted in red, and the main organisers

are plotted in blue, and it just shows them travelling down

almost in unison, but one using the M5 and one using the rail networks.

With the detection part of the operation well under way,

the SOCIT team now begin their next phase - to disrupt the two gangs.

And this is the clever bit.

They're going to do it in such a way the gangs won't know

they're being targeted.

A specialist police unit intercepts them

on one of the main roads that leads into Cornwall.

I'm a member of the Road Crime Unit.

the unit was formed six years ago, consisting of one sergeant,

three detectives and three traffic officers.

We've got a mixture of both unmarked and marked cars. We're tasked

to stop certain individuals in certain vehicles at certain times.

And to keep the crooks clueless,

the police act like it's a normal traffic cop stop.

Quite surprisingly, if these people are carrying a large amount of drugs,

they seem to have a habit of speeding, so they will quite often do

90,100 miles an hour, which gives us a perfect excuse to stop the vehicle.

Not a smart move, to speed with a car full of drugs.

After several successful stops,

the loss to the gangs begins to have an effect.

We take out their couriers, and they can't be used then again.

We start to reduce the amount of people that they actually have at their disposal.

And also with each seizure there comes a monetary problem

for them, and so they start running out of money,

cos these drugs don't come free.

The gang organisers are forced to become more visible as they try

to replace lost drugs by making deals with new suppliers.

This is CCTV of drug gang bosses meeting at a pub in Sunbury-on-Thames, all very cosy.

But it's a turning point for Chris and his colleagues.

The male at the bar is one of the Falmouth organisers.

And this male who's just walked in is the London supplier.

The next male to enter, this is the courier who returned the week later

to pick up a significant amount of amphetamine and cocaine.

And finally, this is the main Falmouth organiser.

This is a significant meeting.

It only lasted 20 minutes, but this put the principal organisers

of the Falmouth crime gang together with a supplier

and a courier, and knowing that the following week a significant

amount of controlled drugs were seized.

The courier is caught as he's heading back home to Cornwall.

His house is searched, yielding a crop of more evidence.

A rather substantial cannabis factory was discovered

in the double garage.

This was the first indication we had that the

Falmouth crime gang were also cultivating cannabis,

and a cultivation like this could yield up to £120,000.

Despite the increasing amount of drugs now falling

into the hands of the police, the two gangs refused to give up.

They still continued regardless, and were committing offences on bail,

and they were basically becoming so desperate they just had to continue

to try and salvage some cash or something out of their enterprise.

The final piece of the jigsaw the SOCIT team need is

evidence against one of the leaders of the Newquay gang.

Joseph Tucker is about to put a drug deal together,

and the police get a tipoff,

so go along too and deal with him by catching him on camera.

This was coming towards the end of investigation.

Both crime gangs were at breaking point,

and this was almost a last hurrah.

It was ever such a quick meeting at Knutsford services, which is

north of Manchester on the M6 motorway northbound.

And this is the main organiser, and you can see him just about to

get into a vehicle which was being used by the Manchester supplier.

When the drugs are picked up by a courier a fortnight later,

seen here in the corner of the screen, guess what?

The Roads Crime Unit is waiting for them around the corner.

£30,000 was recovered from the Manchester courier

and two kilos of cocaine was seized from the Newquay courier.

This event basically ended the proactive investigation,

of Operation Ipanema.

We had enough evidence from then to put before

the Crown Prosecution Service, who sanctioned charges.

Chris and his colleagues used all the technology available to map out

times, journeys and involvements for each of the gang members.

They spend months

meticulously piecing together their evidence for court.

The evidence supplied by automated numberplate recognition cameras,

mobile phone data and the vast amount of CCTV that is available to us

proves crucial to showing how these people operate in these gangs.

The full picture of evidence is so overwhelming

that 19 out of the 21 accused plead guilty.

All in all, over 100 years' worth of prison sentences are handed out

to this drug dealing syndicate.

The two longest sentences are given to the main organisers from Falmouth and Newquay,

Roy Jones with 13 years and Matthew Bird with 12 years.

The SOCIT team are more than happy with the result.

Very, very happy about those convictions.

I find taking drugs out of the local community,

stopping people being hurt, stopping people being harmed,

and clearly that gives me a good feeling.

At the end of the day, when you do get a result, you know you are making a real difference.

This isn't low-level drug dealing or people with possession,

these are people that you know are going to get locked up for a long, long time.

Now that the drug gangs have gone down,

other crime levels have gone down, too.

We have been looking very closely at Falmouth and Newquay

and have seen a notable decrease in low-level crime.

There has been a significant reduction in trafficking of drugs

into the county, especially in Falmouth and Newquay,

and although this investigation has come to its conclusion,

it doesn't mean that we're not still looking at the area,

and anyone who wants to step into their place will also get the same treatment.

That's it for today.

Join us next time when the police and the public catch more criminals red handed.