Episode 20 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 and other agencies are using new tactics and technology

so the bad guys get caught in the act.

CCTV is gold dust.

Great evidence for the police.

You've got to have them stopped.

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

The eureka moment when you get that evidence.

And the general public too

can help unsuspecting crooks get their comeuppance.

People won't stand by.

I couldn't sit back and do nothing.

Yes! We've got her!

So, anyone who is up to no good had better think twice.

They might just get caught red-handed.

Today, the curious case of the burglar on a bike.

Minutes after committing his crimes, he simply vanishes like a ghost.

He was disappearing very quickly, almost as if into thin air.

Now you see him, now you don't,

but how did this escape artist keep slipping through the net?

Also today, putting a spoke in the wheel of bike crime.

Police devise a hi-tech trap to track down the thieves,

and it seems to work.

One man takes the bait within just half-an-hour.

We're all thinking, "That's fantastic! How quickly is that?"

The adrenaline starts running.

You think, "Right, we need to get there."

And not just smash and grab, but crash and grab.

Two reckless ram-raiders

go on a destructive after-hours shopping spree,

but they find themselves in a tight corner.

Tadworth, Surrey.

A motorcyclist pulls up outside a house as if he owns the place,

but he doesn't live here and he doesn't have a key.

He intends to simply smash his way in.

He's a prolific burglar who has escaped from prison

and is on the run.

But he is like the Invisible Man.

It was a puzzling and frustrating picture.

He breaks into people's homes and steals valuable jewellery.

I lost my grandmother's jewellery.

It's like losing part of your own history.

The hunt is on for this slippery customer,

who appears to disappear straight after committing a crime.

Surrey is one of the most affluent areas in the UK,

so it's attractive to burglars.

DI Richard Haycock has been policing the area for nearly 20 years.

We deal with a range of crimes

and a significant portion of those crimes are burglaries to houses.

Because the travel routes are so easy - the roads, the rail -

it's easy to come into Surrey, commit crime

and then get out very quickly.

And, recently, it became clear to the police

they had a new, unwelcome visitor to their patch.

We started to get reports of burglaries to houses

and what we noticed was a very similar method

of committing these burglaries.

And it's not long before Richard gets to see some CCTV evidence

of exactly how this criminal operates.

It's a Friday lunchtime in July.

A man on a motorcycle pulls up at a house in Tadworth.

He parks the bike and rings the doorbell

to see if anyone is at home.

No-one answers.

Believing the house is empty,

he walks down the side looking for a way in.

Then, back to the front door, he tries to kick it open.

But it doesn't budge, so he grabs a rock.

He throws it at the window, but it doesn't break.

Now he seems to lose interest

and starts to wheel his bike back to the road.

But the homeowner is at home after all

and, after being woken by the noise, shouts at the man,

but this doesn't seem to bother the burglar, who just rides away.

The house owner calls the police.

who arrive within minutes and flood the local area hunting for the bike.

But, mysteriously, neither the man nor his motorbike

are anywhere to be seen.

The person responsible was seemingly disappearing very quickly,

almost as if into thin air.

It was a puzzling and frustrating picture.

One of the mysterious burglar's early victims in Tadworth

was Angela.

She and her partner have made their home in the village

in a house that is Angela's pride and joy.

At the time, Angela had been looking after her mother-in-law's jewellery.

My mother-in-law had been ill in hospital for quite some time.

Her hands started swelling up.

We took her jewellery off and she gave it to me and said,

"I want you to have this."

I brought it home and put it in a drawer in a kitchen

where we were keeping anything of any importance to her.

On returning from a hospital visit,

Angela is shocked as she walks into her home.

Just, literally stopped in horror.

Everything had just been thrown all over the place.

You just freeze and then the fear hits you

that whoever has done this could still be in the house.

But, in fact, the burglar has left and Angela immediately dials 999.

When the police arrive, Angela checks the kitchen drawer.

Her mother-in-law's rings are gone.

And the thought that she had just given me the rings,

it was just horrible.

Then we walked around the house

and saw that the bedrooms had all been turned upside down.

There are other items of jewellery missing

which, for Angela, are irreplaceable.

I lost christening bracelets, 21st birthday presents,

my grandmother's jewellery.

It's like losing part of your own history.

It was to be especially heartbreaking because,

shortly after the burglary, Angela's mother-in-law health deteriorated.

The biggest impact I think on me was losing my mother-in-law's jewellery,

purely because she died so soon afterwards.

That was the worst part.

Richard is determined to catch this callous crook

before he strikes again.

It's one of those crimes that the police take personally.

They have been into someone's house, they have violated their privacy.

A heinous crime.

So we are really fired-up around making sure that justice is served.

And he gets an immediate lead.

The police forensic team find a discarded cigarette end

in Andrea's front garden.

Cigarette butts are great for recovering DNA,

so that cigarette butt was taken.

It was submitted for examination

and DNA was found from the cigarette butt,

which then starts to put our criminal at the crime scene.

The DNA results unmask the man as Adam Yaroo,

a convict on the run who has recently absconded

from Sudbury Prison, near Derby.

What became apparent was the trail of crime.

From the absconding from prison, we had offences in Derbyshire,

Oxfordshire, Kent, Sussex,

down to really his stamping ground, South London,

and his offending area in Surrey.

And the burglar's motorcycle is not his only means of transport.

It's part of an elaborate story he uses

if he meets a homeowner in the middle of a break-in.

That story was he had been involved in or was a witness to an accident

that occurred the day before involving a motorbike

and he was looking for witnesses.

So, they know how he operates and who he is,

but Richard and his team now need to find the escaped prisoner.

Now you are on a manhunt and at that point everything gears up.

Richard's team pulls together every piece of information

they can find about their suspect.

We start to build a profile around that person

in terms of family, associates, locations they are likely to be in,

so you really try and get inside the mind of the criminal

and try and think, "If I was them, where would I be?"

And then, the burglar appeared at another address in Surrey.

Here we see him arrive at this premises.

You can see the patterns are played out time and time again.

With his cover story ready, Yaroo rings the doorbell.

No-one is home and he commits another burglary.

The stuff is in the rucksack.

Away he goes.

And, once again, he seems to simply vanish from the Surrey roads.

Police are frustrated.

The burglar must have a way of hiding himself and the bike.

It feels like you're in a chess game,

but with very high and very real stakes.

And, at some point, you want to make the checkmate move

that brings the person into custody.

And that's just what Richard does.

They get a breakthrough when they cross-reference information

about the burglar's known associates.

That led us to an address in Clapham,

which we put under observations,

which led to the break in the case.

Early one morning, we see this guy come out of the house

and he is arrested.

And it soon becomes clear just how Yaroo

has managed to disappear into thin air after a crime.

Police believe he has a van.

He was travelling to the areas he was committing crimes in in the van

with the motorcycle in the back.

He was unloading the motorcycle, doing the burglaries for the day,

then quickly putting the bike back in the van and staying in the van.

A load of police activity would go on around him

and when it had all died down he would drive away.

But it's the end of the road for Adam Yaroo.

In court, he pleads guilty to four counts of burglary

and two of attempted burglary,

with a further 36 offences to be taken into consideration.

He is sentenced to five years behind bars.

When you get that sort of result,

the amount of time and effort and sleepless nights

and sweat and machinations that you put into it is all worth it.

It was nice to know that justice was done and he was caught.

I think the police have done a fantastic job.

Angela never got her precious jewellery back,

but she was determined to create some new memories

that could never be stolen.

Not having anything to pass on now to the children and grandchildren

really is a horrible thing,

so when we got the jewellery paid for,

my whole family went to Sri Lanka on holiday with it.

So, in a way, they got their inheritance in that way.

Now, people sometimes say they are going to "hit the shops".

But not like this!

It's nearly 6.30 on a Monday morning

when two men in a stolen car

smash through the doors of a shopping centre.

The driver avoids a children's toy ride,

but then sets off crashing into everything else in sight.

Now, it may look like he's performing

the world's worst three-point turn,

but there's method in this madness.

He is ramming through the shutters of this jewellery store

and, once inside, the pair embark on a smash-and-grab raid.

After a minute's looting, they get back in the car

and, with difficulty, drive off back the way they came.

Less than 24 hours later, in another shopping centre and another car,

one of the same men is out with a new partner in crime.

And they are looking to get more goods knocked down off the shelf

in the same destructive way.

But their greed and reckless demolition catches up with them,

leaving an unexpected item in the bagging area.

Police find DNA at the scene of the raids

and charge a 20-year-old and an 18-year-old

with a shopping list of offences.

So, instead of smashing through security bars,

they are now likely to be looking through them.

Coming up, a city office.

This man looks like an executive arriving for work,

but his business is thieving.

Thanks very much. I've got two laptops in my bag.

He is waved through security

and, unbelievably, even helps himself to a coffee

before helping himself to more valuables.

Cycling in Britain is booming

and bikes these days are worth an awful lot more

than the rusty old Chopper I used to have.

But, sadly, that makes them a popular attraction for thieves.

Derby, in the East Midlands, has had a problem with bike theft.

A lucrative business for crooks stealing bikes

worth from £50 to thousands.

We've had nearly £750,000 worth of bikes stolen in the force last year.

And it's not just the money.

The thefts are causing disruption

in the lives of several victims every day.

At the time it was my only mode of transport,

so, when it was gone,

trips to college went from 10 minutes to an hour-and-a-half walk.

So the police decide to put the brakes on this crime spree

and set up a special sting operation to catch the thieves.

Derby is home to one of the UK's newest velodromes

and the city is gaining a growing number of cyclists.

But where there are more bikes...

..there are also more bike thieves.

Sergeant Mark Preston heads up a unit in the constabulary

tackling bike crime.

I've been a police officer for 20 years

and I've got an interest in bikes and bike theft.

I like cycling myself.

Across the UK, a bike is stolen every 84 seconds.

In Derbyshire, police have noticed a steep rise in cases

all over the county.

It was becoming three or four cycle thefts in a day.

We have had nearly £750,000 worth of bikes stolen in the force last year.

Thieves steal the bikes to sell them on. It's big business.

Some of the people stealing these bikes

are putting them on online auction sites very quickly.

You can have something sold within half-an-hour.

People are travelling all over the country to come and buy these bikes.

These thefts can cause real problems for victims

like 17-year-old engineering student Jack,

who relies on his dad's bike to get to and from college.

The bike was important to me because, although it was not mine,

it was my father's, it was my only mode of transport.

Without it, I couldn't really go anywhere.

But one Friday, Jack falls victim to the bike thieves.

On this morning, he rides to college in Derby city centre

where he locks the bike to a stand.

There were loads of people,

so no-one is going to take it with all these people around.

Believing the bike safe, he heads into his course.

At 3:30 we finished and we came out

and I went to where I remembered locking up my bike

and it wasn't there.

I just start panicking.

Jack searches frantically for his dad's bike.

I was a feeling of anger and just frustration.

But it's all to no avail.

Jack and his dad never see the bike again.

Because of the growing number of victims like Jack,

Mark and his unit at Derbyshire Police plan an organised campaign

aimed at stopping the thieves having an easy ride.

We needed to look at how we can resolve this,

how we can target offenders,

how we can encourage people to think about crime prevention.

First, Mark wants to send out a strong message

to shock the area's bike thieves.

And the best way to start is to catch someone red-handed,

so he plants a special capture bike.

It looked like just a normal bike that's parked in the right location.

But the bike's secretly rigged with surveillance technology.

We put the camera looking at the bike.

Also, there's equipment within the bike

that allows us to track the bike and where it goes to.

On a cold December morning,

Mark leaves the capture bike locked up in the city centre

at a known hotspot for bike theft.

He then waits to see what happens.

If the bike moves,

the hidden equipment will immediately send a message to Mark.

And he doesn't have to wait long.

Less than half an hour later...

We had the activation.

We're all thinking, "That is fantastic. How quickly is that?"

A man walks past.

He has a good look at Mark's bike, he walks on.

But then he comes back for a second look.

He must think, "That looks like a nice set of wheels",

because, a minute later, he is back a third time

and heads straight for the bike.

He wrenches the bike free from the lock, jumps on and cycles away.

For once, Mark is pleased that a bike's been stolen.

Proud of ourselves for doing it, but we now need to recover the bike.

It's the excitement, the adrenaline starts running

and you think, "Right we need to get there."

Thanks to the technology hidden in the bike,

Mark and his team track it to an address.

Knocked on the door, the door was answered.

Completely denied any knowledge of what it was all about

and what we were there for.

As we were searching, the bike was in a cupboard.

We arrested the offender and it was happy days for us.

The man is given a Community Order

and Mark hopes that word will spread around to all Derby's bike thieves.

He's got friends that are probably doing the same offences.

He's telling them, "Watch out, watch out, the police are about."

And to reinforce the message, Mark advertises the police operation

with a selection of eye-catching, colourful bikes.

It gets people talking about it, gets it on social media,

saying Derbyshire police have capture bikes in operation

and that sort of cascades all the way through.

In the coming months, the level of bike thefts go down.

Mark's message appears to be getting through.

But there is one thief in particular who seems a bit slow on the uptake.

CCTV footage of a bicycle being stolen arrives on Mark's desk

and he spots a familiar face.

It's this same man who stole the capture bike.

We know instantly who that offender is.

There he is down at the lock, fiddling about with it,

and he's cut the lock.

Within five seconds he has taken £500 worth of property.

The man is arrested and this time he is going behind bars.

In court, he pleads guilty to 17 various offences,

including bike theft.

He is sentenced to 48 weeks in prison.

Mark's high-profile bike theft campaign

goes on to have a remarkable impact on Derby's crime statistics.

We see a 50% reduction in bike thefts in the city

and also the surrounding areas.

For me, and for the team that was involved in it,

we have achieved something here.

Mark's campaign has been a huge success,

but, unfortunately, it can't bring back the bike

that had been stolen from engineering student Jack,

But Jack mounted a campaign of his own

to find out if anyone had seen who had taken it.

And asking around the nearby shops, he struck lucky.

A customer had filmed it on their phone.

It's a short clip, but it shows three people around Jack's bike

just before it was stolen, snipping the security chain.

It was obvious what the three people were doing.

You could clearly make out the faces,

so I thought if I put it online, hopefully, they would be recognised.

Jack posts the video on the internet and soon gets replies

suggesting the name of one of the thieves.

He passes the information to the police.

When I got the call saying that there had been an arrest

and a prosecution I was quite happy because something had been done.

Justice had been done.

Police officers like Mark do the best they can

to track down the thieves and return stolen bikes.

But there are things we can do

to try to stop our bikes being stolen in the first place.

If it's at all possible,

try and leave your bike in somewhere that's covered by CCTV,

or that's perhaps well-lit and a really busy area

that people are constantly passing by.

The best thing you can do is secure it with a lock,

but two locks is always better than one.

Especially when the locks are different

because they may have to bring two different types of tools

to break the locks.

There are examples where we've found up to 35 bikes

and we've struggled to get them back to their owners

because there's no unique identification for them.

Personalise and security mark your bike,

so that if it is stolen and the police do recover it

we can identify that and get back to you.

Thieves rarely look like baddies from movies.

Sometimes they just blend in and look like

just another face in the crowd.

The City of London.

As an important financial hub,

the Square Mile's high-rise office blocks

are filled with valuable hi-tech equipment containing sensitive data.

This man is not bothered about data, though.

He's just after the equipment.

He sneaks into offices to steal expensive laptops.

He was so brazen and acted with extreme confidence.

He blends into the office buildings,

wearing a suit and looking just like any other worker.

He takes laptops to sell for cash,

but even though he has no interest in what is on them,

for the victims, the information that is lost can be crucial.

If anything happens to any of our data, it affects the whole business.

He strikes time and time again,

going in and out of many different buildings.

Just extremely frustrating. He was being really elusive.

He needs to be stopped.

Over 300,000 people commute into the City of London every day.

Raj is one of them.

He works for an IT company.

It's up to me, as an IT manager,

to ensure that all the IT works and ticks as it's supposed to.

But one Thursday evening, Raj comes across a different kind of gremlin

from the sort he normally comes across in computers.

It is just after 6.00pm.

Raj and a colleague return to their office after a works do

and come face-to-face with a man they haven't met before.

Me and my colleague are fairly new to the company

and I'm not familiar with every single face.

So I walked in, said "Hi" to him

and he acknowledged that we were here.

It did not look suspicious at all.

They assume the man works for the company and leave him to it.

We come out of the server room and he was gone.

The next day, Raj is shocked to discover

two important laptops are missing and,

after a check on the building's CCTV,

he realises he had seen the thief.

I thought, "Oh, my God, he was literally within hand's reach."

I'd just literally walked past him

and did not suspect anything until the following day.

Thankfully, all the data is password-protected and encrypted,

but, even so, losing the laptops is a worry.

If the thief, whoever he sold it to, can unlock it,

then it could be a massive impact to the organisation.

The laptop theft is reported to the City of London Police,

where it joins a pile of similar reports

on the desk of Detective Sergeant Richard Peacock.

There's as been a spike in this type of crime.

Richard and his team suspect that it is the work of just one thief,

but, so far, he has evaded capture.

Richard is frustrated when he sees this latest report.

Your heart sinks, really, because now another crime is committed

and you're wondering how many more there are going to be

before we apprehend him.

But several weeks of intense investigation

has revealed some clues.

This is CCTV footage

of the man's first attempted office burglary in the City.

It's March, early evening, and a security camera shows him entering,

looking like a businessman deep in conversation on the phone.

He thinks that if he shows that he belongs there,

then no-one is going to question him.

He flashes a pass at security and heads upstairs in a lift.

The CCTV camera shows he spends half-an-hour

wandering around the building looking for something to steal,

but this time he leaves empty-handed.

He walks around the corner to another office block.

The reception cameras there show how, when one of their employees

lets himself out of the locked main door, the thief nips smartly in.

He waited for the door to be opened by that member of staff.

The thief pretends to be on the phone again

and walks through to the office areas.

When at one point he is challenged by a member of staff,

he is ready with an answer.

She said, "What you doing?",

and he said, "Well, I'm here to do an audit."

He went about his business counting up the work stations

and all the electrical hardware and helped himself to a few.

The light-fingered laptop thief

gets away with four more stolen machines in his backpack,

but the next day when Richard goes in to investigate, he gets a lead.

This time, the thief has made a mistake.

He may have left behind some DNA evidence.

He was walking around with a clipboard.

On the clipboard, the witness had told us were some papers,

but he stupidly forgot to take those with him.

The paperwork is sent for forensic analysis.

Richard also has the CCTV images.

We produced a couple of close-up stills from this

and circulated them.

Some officers think they recognise him and put forward a name.

Darren Harriot.

The DNA results back from the lab confirm it is him.

We had a number of addresses for the suspect.

But all their leads turn out to be dead ends.

Harriot is in hiding.

They continue their hunt, but the next time they see him

is a few weeks later on CCTV after another crime.

He walks straight past the front desk and waves at the staff.

He was so brazen and acted with extreme confidence.

He even helps himself to a hot drink.

He appears to have obtained a coffee from the premises.

And he waves on his way out too.

Thanks very much, I've got two laptops in my bag.

Over several weeks, Harriot strikes again and again,

managing to evade capture.

It's extremely frustrating that you know who is doing it,

but you can't actually get hold of them.

Patrols are increased in the early evening period around offices

and we're doing everything we can with all our contacts

to find out where he is.

The team check out every lead they can find, no matter how small.

We came upon a tiny, tiny snippet of information.

I just wanted to get it bottomed-out straight away.

This small scrap of intelligence points to an address

where Harriot could be hiding out.

I went round to the address.

Much to my surprise, he opened the door.

And, finally, after all of their hard work,

police arrest the elusive Darren Harriot.

His business suit and mobile phone just seized,

Richard compiles all the evidence for the court case.

Harriot is found guilty

and sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison.

I'm really, really pleased that he has finally been put behind bars.

That's it for today.

Join us next time when police and the public

catch more criminals red-handed.

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