Episode 8 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,

where the bad guys are getting caught in the act.

The CCTV was vital.

You can see they are definitely the people there.

The camera doesn't lie.

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

There's a 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's up to no good had better think twice.

They might just get Caught Red Handed.

Today, men in chemical hazard suits burst into a jeweller's.

But the only hazard here is them!

One has a shotgun and the other has an axe.

They then shouted, "Everybody down! This is a raid!

"Everybody down on the floor!"

A quarter of a million pounds' worth of watches gone in just 90 seconds!

Also today, the brazen thief who steals people's bags

from right above their heads.

Unbelievable.

I'm not quite sure how I could've missed that.

And a pair of vandals go ripping up flowerbeds,

but these garden pests are digging a hole for themselves.

The market town of Beverley in Yorkshire.

The staff of a family-run jewellery shop are opening up for the day.

But the first customers through the door aren't shoppers.

They're robbers!

Heavily armed with a shotgun and an axe.

It was just sheer terror.

The noise, glass going everywhere, the shouting -

it's extremely frightening.

They grab valuable watches.

About a quarter of a million pounds' worth.

And they're careful to leave no evidence for the police.

To not give themselves away forensically -

obviously meticulous planning took place.

But even the best-laid plans can sometimes miss simple things.

Guest Philips Jeweller's in Beverley

is a family business that started in the '60s.

Philip and Karen Guest took over the running of it

from their father 15 years ago.

It's really great working with my brother.

We're very fortunate, we get on really well together.

It's great. We both have our own areas -

my sister specialising in the antiques, I do the modern.

It's a constant hubbub of people coming in that we know -

family, friends, relations - and always a good atmosphere.

Sian has worked here for three years.

We all get on well together and you can come and have a laugh and

joke with your colleagues and also do the job that you're paid to do.

She enjoys helping couples celebrate their engagement.

It's nice to take part in that moment,

when they've just been proposed to,

and they're looking for a ring together - it's very interesting.

It is a beautiful trade. There's just the one downside to it, really.

And that downside is?

When robbers come to call.

Karen's been attacked by armed robbers once before,

when she was on her own in another shop 25 years ago.

Unfortunately, these two chaps came in and they tied me up and,

because I refused to open the safe, they kicked me in the head.

Um...

which, er... obviously, was very scary.

At one point, I did actually forget how to breathe, which is

a bit of a strange thing to say, but, because it's something

you do automatically, I didn't know how to start breathing again.

Those raiders were eventually caught by police,

but the attack had a lasting effect.

You don't want something like that to ruin your life

and, unfortunately, that's exactly what it was doing.

I found I was frightened walking down the road.

I was looking behind me all the time, I was really nervous.

And because I lived on my own as well, it was very difficult.

Karen eventually got her nerve back

and she hoped nothing like it would ever happen again.

But one summer's day, it does.

This time, though, she's not on her own.

What you think is going to be a normal day turns out to be

a pretty horrifying, nasty one.

The raid is captured by the shop's cameras.

They record still images every few seconds.

I'd just come into this department

to sort out one or two little things.

I was moving a few pieces around in the jewellery window.

I was just having a general tidy up, cleaning.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two figures running up

the entrance area and I instantly knew what was going to happen.

You can't quite comprehend what you're seeing.

The door burst open violently.

There were two chaps in full forensic white outfits.

They shouted.

"Everybody down, this is a raid. Everybody down on the floor!"

One of the robbers has an axe. The other, a sawn-off shotgun.

It was...just sheer terror.

I think 1,001 things go through your mind.

You realise there's only so much you can do when someone is armed.

I just said, "OK, OK," and put my hands up.

They went straight around the corner to the watch department.

And come face-to-face with Karen.

The taller man with a black bag was pulling an axe out from the bag.

He told us to get on the floor.

Everyone gets down.

The men make straight for the expensive watches.

Another member of staff walks through to see what's going on.

Unfortunately, he had to come and lie down on the floor

so by this stage he had four of us.

Just off-camera, the man with the axe

starts smashing a glass window display.

You can imagine an axe hitting glass but the shouting as well,

I'll never forget the sound. It was terrible.

Having been through an armed robbery previously,

keeping calm is the most important thing.

You've got to be so careful

because they may not mean to pull the trigger,

but the height, they are so ready for this.

Philip and Sian find themselves out of the robbers' sight.

I dived in here to press the panic alarm.

We then seized our opportunity to bolt up this staircase.

I tried to lock the door.

I don't know what I was thinking of

or if they might run upstairs as well.

Her hands were shaking so badly that she couldn't actually lock it.

They run up the stairs to get to a phone.

In the street, eyewitnesses are already calling the police

and Sian notices something else.

I was looking out and I could see the getaway car.

The driver is revving the engine for a quick escape.

Downstairs, the other staff, including Karen,

lie on the floor, terrified.

The robbers are in a frenzy, smashing cabinets with the axe.

The whole area is filled with obviously aggression

and not nice feelings and panic, really,

because they want to get out as quickly as they can.

Police are on their way.

After a minute and a half in the shop,

the men leave with a quarter of a million pounds' worth of watches.

I picked up our umbrella vase and leant out the window

as far as I could and I managed to launch it.

The vase hits one of the robbers on his shoulder but it doesn't stop him.

They dive into the getaway car and head off.

The tyres were screeching

and squealing as they head straight out with great speed.

They'd gone.

Later, the police find the getaway car dumped in a field.

With no forensic opportunities initially in the job,

that car became the centre of the inquiry at that point.

It's their only lead but the car is still hiding a few secrets.

Also coming up, this man is not running for a train.

He's running FROM a train and being chased.

He's a thief and risks his life to escape.

And it's hard to believe what this driver is about to ditch

in a leafy lane, right in front of a hidden camera.

But first, a pair of flower disarrangers

who try to spoil their neighbourhood.

Late one Friday night,

a CCTV operator notices that either the city's gardeners have had

an off day or...oh, no,

some vandals have been ripping up the flower beds.

And these herbicidal maniacs don't stop

until they have devastated the whole display.

What's worse,

they seem absurdly proud of their actions as they stroll off.

But to restore our faith in human nature, along comes this man.

Discovering the damage to the flowers,

he provides the green shoots of recovery

and replants them, one by one.

What took the vandals seconds to destroy

takes him ten minutes to carefully repair.

Good on you, sir!

And don't worry, this destructive duo don't get away with it.

The CCTV operator stalks them on other cameras

until they get into a cab and he knows the number plate.

The two men are rooted out by the police and are convicted of

wilful damage, and hopefully,

that will lead them to turn over a new leaf.

When we're out and about,

we all try to keep an eye on our belongings

but to avoid the attention of this next thief,

we'd need eyes in the top of our heads.

Central London and in the capital's major train stations,

there's a thief about.

This could be a normal passenger but they're not looking at him,

they're not looking around, they're just looking at what they're doing.

Masquerading as a commuter,

he brazenly steals from right above his victims' heads.

I can't believe how blatant it is.

I'm not quite sure how I could have missed that.

Taking wallets, purses, entire bags,

he commits a large number of thefts in less than a month.

Increasingly desperate, he risks his life to escape.

A train could have killed him quite easily there.

Using an undercover team,

police are determined to stop this criminal in his tracks.

There are more passengers moving through London

than anywhere else in Britain so it's not surprising that it has

more than its fair share of purse snatchers and bag thieves.

To combat these crooks,

the British Transport Police have formed the Pan London Theft Team,

a group of undercover plain-clothes officers

including Detective Dave Graney.

We've got eight teams that will go out all the time

looking for thieves on the underground system or the main lines

so they're at our disposal and we use them

to cover King's Cross and Paddington stations at different times.

These teams were recently put to the test by rising

cases of thefts from trains while waiting at London stations.

For example, the case of Mark,

setting off on a business trip up north.

A train security camera shows Mark just after

getting on board at King's Cross station.

It was an early start on the day.

I got the papers I needed out of my bag.

I had my work phone because I was using that.

I had my newspaper and then I just stuck the bag

in the overhead luggage rack.

I've travelled on trains for ages and never had anything nicked.

I've never lost anything on a train.

But that's until this man boards Mark's train.

Mark can be seen sitting here on the left.

The man stops next to him.

He's spotted Mark's bag on the rack.

From a different camera angle, the man steps into the seat behind.

He puts his own bag next to Mark's.

When the coast is clear,

the thief starts to riffle through Mark's bag right above his head.

I just didn't think anybody could take it off without me noticing.

The thief stops riffling.

He just takes the whole bag.

Using his coat to conceal his stolen goods, he gets off the train.

It's several hours later

when Mark gets to Durham that he gets a nasty surprise.

It was actually as I went past Durham Cathedral

that I remembered a previous trip there.

I'd walked up to the top of the cathedral tower with my daughter.

So I reached for my personal phone to send her a quick text

because I know she'd be on her way to school.

And my bag wasn't there.

And it's only when Mark realises the awful truth, as well as losing

his laptop and phone, Mark's house and car keys are also in the bag.

It was just that frustration that we were having to sort out

a locksmith at home.

How was I going to get from the station to home?

The sum of all those things just really

increased my levels of frustration for the rest of the day.

This is the first time Mark has seen the footage of the man

stealing his belongings.

I can't believe how blatant it is.

There he is putting the coat up.

Looking round a fair amount, I guess.

Look at that! Unbelievable.

I guess that's him moving my bag.

Unless I was deep in papers or...

I'm not quite sure how I could have missed that.

Off he goes, out of the station.

Wow.

He believes he has seen the last of his precious possessions.

But it's not the last we'll see of this particular thief.

Two days after Mark's theft,

another and more disturbing incident is reported.

DC Dave Graney is called in to investigate the case.

I first became aware of the suspect

by officers from Paddington.

They sent me some quite grainy images of a suspect running away.

This time, the thief's tactics are rather more extreme.

On the four minutes on that carriage he was looking for victims.

He found a female victim who had her handbag on the floor.

He's pulled the handbag towards him by the strap.

The woman catches the thief going through her bag

and he runs off the train with her boyfriend giving chase.

Desperate to get away, the thief runs right across the railway tracks.

To the surprise of passers-by, he climbs up onto the opposite platform.

He's not looked, he's gone straight across the tracks.

A train could have killed him quite easily there.

Thankfully, the boyfriend carried on along the platform

and didn't decide to go across the tracks.

He's obviously running for his life.

The thief manages to escape with the passenger's purse and phone.

The images are blurry but Dave thinks he might know this thief.

I've been dealing with thieves for 14 years

and I've dealt with this person from day one.

I hoped it wasn't him

because he has been on the straight and narrow for the last two years.

If it was him, then he's quite prolific so I needed to know

whether it was him or not.

Dave fears the man has literally come off the rails again

but he needs to be sure.

And then just a couple of days later, there is yet another theft.

Dave Graney recognises a familiar face.

It's him.

Putting his jacket up on the luggage rack.

He then reaches across to rummage through his target's bag.

Finding a wallet, he pockets it and walks off the train

with no-one the wiser.

More cases land on Dave's desk.

There were four or five offences with his name written all over it

so I checked the CCTV suites on those trains, those platforms,

and it was him all those times.

Amongst the CCTV evidence Dave Graney receives

is the footage from King's Cross of the theft of Mark's laptop bag

and it's clear, like the others, it's the thief's handiwork.

But now they have to find him.

With no known current address,

Dave and the undercover theft team will have to catch him

the next time he visits one of the busy London stations.

Though Dave can't join the covert teams himself.

Because I've dealt with him a number of times, he knows me quite well.

He knows myself and my colleague and he has run from us every time.

It's always difficult trying to catch him red-handed

when he knows you so well.

So they send out teams of other plain-clothes officers

that he won't recognise to scour the platforms.

We got a number of teams covering King's Cross station all day

basically in shifts.

So we had all bases covered.

We had another team at Paddington covering all day.

And it's at Paddington that finally the thief is spotted.

Fortunately, the suspect was seen on the over bridge

by one of the members of that team.

When he saw the CCTV, he could only put his hands up,

which is what he did.

He admitted to all the offences.

The man's crime spree has hit the buffers.

He is convicted of five counts of theft

and sentenced to 13 months' imprisonment.

There's also a surprisingly good result for Mark in the end.

After the thief stole his laptop and bag,

he tried selling it on but the buyer phones Mark.

So getting back to London from Newcastle,

Mark had the unexpected pleasure

of being reunited with his bag the very same day.

I've been quite lucky about this.

Elation to get my bag back, everything intact.

My phone, my laptop, my work notes, my house keys.

Yes, it was good to get it back.

We often need to carry valuable items like laptops and phones

so how do we keep ourselves safe from thieves?

Put your wallet in your front pocket.

It's so much more harder for a thief to steal

from the front side of a body.

A back pocket is just an easier target.

I would always advise, if you're carrying some type of bag,

to put the strap across your chest rather than over your shoulder.

This way, it makes it a little bit harder for someone to remove it

and pull it away from you.

Carry your backpack on your front

whilst you're in a crowded area or

perhaps to even wear a bell on the zip so that if the offender does try

to unzip it, you can actually hear the bell sound as they do it.

Just think, if I did get my bag stolen today, how gutted I'd feel

if I'd lost that photograph, that extra cash I was carrying

that I wasn't supposed to be.

So, just think about, "What do I need for today?"

One thing to always watch out for is when you've got

your driving licence and your house keys in there together,

they've got your physical address on and if the person gets hold of your

house keys as well, that's just inviting them to go to the house

and potentially commit burglary.

When this local beauty spot is blighted by fly-tippers,

the council put in a camera to catch the blighters.

And they see someone tipping something

that's not exactly flyweight.

A man is parked on a secluded country lane.

He takes a shifty look around and then puts on some gloves.

What is he up to?

Whatever it is, he clearly doesn't want to be spotted.

He's getting out something heavy from the van.

It's a complete car engine and, yes, he's dumping it.

And judging by the way he's struggling to move the thing,

it's going to be a nasty job for whoever has to clear it away.

Not that this man cares about that.

But his plan, like his defunct engine, has totally misfired.

He doesn't realise, but it's all been captured on camera.

The council are running an anti-fly-tipping campaign

and their hidden cameras are revved up and firing on all cylinders.

In court, he's ordered to pay more than ?1,300 in fines and costs.

Crikey! He could have bought a whole car for that!

Now, back at the family-run jeweller's in Beverley, Yorkshire,

there's been an armed robbery.

One man has a sawn-off shotgun,

while the other smashes glass cabinets with an axe to steal

a quarter of a million pounds' worth of watches.

The staff are left shocked and upset.

Terrifying.

The most terrifying thing that's ever happened to me and,

hopefully, nothing like that will ever happen again.

There was an awful lot of glass, obviously, shattered.

It was like car windscreens, broken car windscreens, everywhere.

At least everybody came out of this. Nobody was hurt.

Let us help the police as much as we can and, most of all,

let's get these guys.

That is the most important thing.

Out of everything, that is what you want.

The police raced to the scene.

They examined the shop for evidence.

Detective Sergeant Mike Gotch is in charge of the investigation.

For the victims, it was a very frightening, harrowing experience.

It's not just about the day,

it's a memory they have to continually live with

and try and deal with themselves.

Mike gets his first lead. The robbers' getaway car is discovered.

The vehicle was located by the police helicopter on farmer's land.

There were still two watches in the vehicle which clearly shows

a sense of urgency for them to leave as quickly as possible.

The robbers have switched cars and disappear in another unknown vehicle.

The manhunt begins.

Mike and his colleagues thoroughly search the car,

the jewellery shop and the recorded CCTV for any evidence.

They were very well disguised.

They wore full forensic white paper suits, they wore large boots,

gloves and they obviously wore ski masks covering their faces

underneath the white hoods.

It looks like the raid was carefully planned.

They knew exactly where they were going.

He headed straight for the window that he wanted to smash.

When people do come into our shop, they always say,

"Wow, it's like a rabbit warren."

It's probably about four shops knocked into one.

You'd be very reluctant to walk into that shop

and not know what you're going to be greeted with.

The police find no forensic evidence

so Mike's only clue is the getaway car.

With no forensic opportunities initially in the job,

the car became the centre of the inquiry at that point.

It's important that they trace the history of that car.

We found the last known keeper of that vehicle

and from that we established they sold the vehicle approximately

a week before the offence took place.

They'd had some communication via an unknown buyer

using a mobile telephone.

Thankfully, the previous keeper had noted the mobile phone

number of the car buyer.

From that, we highlighted key people which

we suspected were involved in the robbery.

A group of suspects are linked to the phone. Among them, these two men.

22-year-old Kevin Smith and 19-year-old Jack O'Neill.

One of them is already under investigation

by a neighbouring force.

Our key was to work with South Yorkshire to make sure

these people were brought to justice.

Mike doesn't have any forensic evidence to prove

they were at the scene of the robbery,

but there may be grounds to charge them with another serious offence.

The offence is conspiracy to commit robbery.

So, what we're saying is, they were involved in

the planning of the robbery.

Convinced the shop was scouted before the attack,

Mike's colleagues sift through days and days of CCTV footage.

When they go back a fortnight, they find what they're looking for.

These are the doors that the

offenders burst through on the day of the robbery.

You see two males asking questions of a member of staff here.

You can see the member of staff directs them

round to the watch cabinet.

They are two of Mike's prime suspects,

Kevin Smith and Jack O'Neill.

They've gone to the shop, they've looked at the layout of the shop

and they've worked out where, specifically, the watches are kept.

That's very consistent with

the cabinets that were targeted during the robbery.

Mike has clear evidence they planned the raid.

From that, we got CCTV from Beverley of them going into the shop

and looking around the market town with their vehicle outside

the shop which was, again, a key part of the investigation.

They are both arrested.

One of them is also charged with conspiring to raid several

other businesses.

Conspiracy to rob is a serious charge

and carries the same maximum sentence as robbery.

Smith is jailed for a total of ten years for his part in planning

the robbery of the jeweller's

and other commercial premises in South Yorkshire.

O'Neill is jailed for nine years.

That is a really satisfying result, a lot of work by the whole team.

Obviously, more importantly,

justice for the victims who've been put through a horrendous ordeal.

It was closure for the victims to get satisfaction that the

people have been caught.

It was a great relief to know that, finally,

they've been put behind bars. The police did a fantastic job.

Hats off to them. They were superb!

Since the raid, security at the jeweller's has been strengthened

and so has their relationship with the people of Beverley.

We were actually swamped with messages of goodwill, with cards.

Boxes of chocolate and cakes.

We were just overwhelmed the next day.

We didn't know where to put all the flowers.

We knew where to put all the cakes, funnily enough!

And I think that helped everybody.

You have to move on and you have to just go,

"Well, life is for living

"and I can't just dwell on all the bad things.

"Let's enjoy the good things."

That's it for today.

Join us next time when police and the public

catch more criminals red-handed.

If there is nothing new, then the Court of Appeal

aren't going to change their decision.

You have to question everything.

There were two areas of fingerprints on the carrier bag.