Stolen mobile phones

20th May 2025

Our Ref: FOI2025/03453

Request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 Ref No: FOI2025/03453

I write in connection with your request for information received on 18th April.  I note you seek access to the following information:

1. How many stolen or suspected stolen mobile phones are currently held by the force having been recovered by officers?
   
   2. How many stolen or suspected stolen phones have been recovered by the force in the past five years?
   
   If possible it would be helpful if this data is broken down by year.
   
   3. Of these, how many have successfully been returned to their owners?
   
   I understand that questions 2 and 3 will be harder to answer (I imagine the first one could be answered with a simple inventory check) so if they are impossible to provide a clear response to I will accept an answer to just question one.

I am required by the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (The Act) to handle all requests in a manner that is blind to the identity of the requestor. Any information released in response to a request is regarded as being published and therefore, in the public domain without caveat.

Response - Following enquiries within the Constabulary please see our response below.

Please see the following caveat

We have provided responses below however these are only approximate figures based on the quality of recording of the data within our recording system. We have searched the ‘property status’, which allows us to identify stolen/recovered mobile phones, but we would anticipate this being an underestimate.The search was undertaken, looking at the last five years’ worth of data (from 2020/21) using the Incident Reported Date.

It returned records where there was mention of stolen phones (mobile phones) in the Initial MO and/or Incident Summary and where the property code(s) were ‘Electrical’, ‘Telephony’ ‘Mobile Phone’. The final qualifier was to look at the Property Status, where the status was ‘stolen/recovered’.

1. No Information held
2.  

The numerical data presented in this response is an un-audited snapshot of un-published data sourced from "live" systems and is subject to the interpretation of the original request by the individual extracting the data.