On a rainy March afternoon, two undercover police officers cut across central London at breakneck speed to a medley of crime scenes and crimes-in-the-making.
The officers were scouring Soho for luxury watch thieves, a growing priority for the police, when they were diverted first to a man wielding a knife outside a school, then to an assault at Oxford Circus and on to a store where a woman had been robbed.
“You don’t know what’s going to happen from one minute to the next,” said the 34-year-old constable in the passenger seat of an unmarked car, one of a specialist team tackling a spate of watch theft in the UK capital that has sent jitters as far as Delhi and the watchmakers of Geneva.
In the past two years, London’s Metropolitan Police has assigned officers, data and intelligence resources in an effort to curb the rising incidence of luxury watch theft that has found a pernicious niche in the UK capital.
The phenomenon has been driven by social media, which has raised the profile of watches as status symbols, the comparative ease with which they can be stolen and a recent boom in the pre-owned market.
Emmeline Taylor, criminologist at the City of London university, said extreme inequality in London also lies behind a surge in acquisitive crime.
While the police have notched up successes, and numbers are down on a peak year in 2019, they have yet to dent the trend.
According to the Watch Register, a crime prevention database, 7,344 watches were reported stolen to the Met last year, with a total value of £44mn, up from 6,015 in 2022. The company also flagged an “alarming” rise in the use of violence during thefts.
The crime wave is impinging on the UK capital’s image. On a recent trip to India, shadow foreign secretary David Lammy had his ear bent by the business elite over Rolex robbery in Mayfair and the alleged lack of response from the Met.
While mobile phones are snatched in far greater numbers, watch robbery is higher profile and, in some instances, can lead to serious violence. Last year, four men were jailed for the fatal stabbing of music manager Emmanuel Odunlami while stealing his fake Patek Philippe Nautilus.
Detective chief Inspector Scott Ware, who heads the unit combating violent crime in central London, defended the Met’s response. Last year, in undercover stings at targeted hotspots where wealthy clientele gather, police arrested 32 men. Most of them were charged.
Ware said that across the three boroughs where operations took place, the number of watch thefts fell to 361 between March and October, from 429 during the same period in 2022.
“As much as I try to create an environment which is peaceful and safe for people, for criminals I want that very same environment to be hostile and for them to fear that they are next,” he added.
He also noted the risk inherent in ostentatious displays of wealth. In London some of the world’s richest people rub up against some of England’s poorest.
“You wouldn’t put £200,000 of cash on your wrist. Well, you’re kind of doing that with some of these watches,” he said.
While most offenders were what he called “organised opportunists” there was growing sophistication in the way they planned robberies, stalked victims and zoned in on particular brands.
“When you recover a phone from someone who’s just carried out a watch robbery, there are usually hundreds of images of watches and hundreds of messages sent to people that they horse trade with,” Ware said.
Katya Hills, managing director of the Watch Register, said that compared with the market in stolen art, the one in luxury watches is much hotter, the goods simpler to transport and the rewards more immediate.
While watches were often sold on for 50 per cent or less of their value, that was not always so. Thieves, she said, targeted models that were in high demand but that had been discontinued or for which there were long waiting lists.
For example, the 2022 white gold “Patek Nautilus 5811” retails at £56,000, against an average value on the pre-owned market of nearly three times that.
The Watch Register holds the DNA of 100,000 watches, which it shares with retailers and police forces across the world as part of efforts to disrupt onward sales. It estimated the total value of lost or stolen watches it tracks at £1.5bn. The group said it located an average of four stolen pieces a day.
Its model is gaining traction as watch crime surges globally. Richemont, the luxury goods group that owns Cartier, Baume & Mercier and Piaget among other brands, has set up a free app for customers to register, record and search for lost items.
The idea, said Frank Vivier, Richemont’s chief of transformation, was to move beyond the analogue era where insurance companies, watchmakers and police communicated little and victims were left in the dark.
“We are very, very concerned about [watch theft] becoming an industrial strength problem,” he said. To disincentivise it, “you need the whole industry to work together to attack it from every angle”.
Police are taught the principle of the “golden hour” where a speedy response is critical in tackling crime. Officers on the frontline in Soho said with watch thieves they had minutes to act, if that.
“To steal someone’s watch can take seconds. The ratio of risk to reward is great,” said one of the patrol officers, against the din of background police radio chatter.
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