Seven drivers lost their car badges overnight – police can’t stop it

Thieves stripped the badges off at least seven cars in Thamesfield overnight on Wednesday, six of them VWs, Mercedes and BMWs targeted for the sensors hidden behind the badge itself, worth up to £2,000 each. The seventh was raided by a two-person team on e-bikes who took bags left on view inside.

The Metropolitan Police’s own account of the spree amounts to an admission that officers have little practical way to stop it or catch anyone doing it. Patrol cars cover more than 30 square miles across Wandsworth and Merton and are stretched thinnest in the evening and overnight, exactly when this crime happens. Safer Neighbourhood officers “do not work through the night.”

The admission, in the police’s own words

The badge thefts follow a simple logic. Behind the VW, Mercedes or BMW badge on many modern cars sits a radar sensor that runs adaptive cruise control and lane assist. Prise off the badge and the sensor comes with it, in under ten seconds. The badge itself should be worthless once removed, since it has to be electronically coded to a specific car before it works again, but a black market has opened up.

So what happens when someone reports it? On the police’s own account, not much. The e-bikes used in the wider theft pattern are “illegal versions capable of motorbike speeds,” Catherall wrote, and catching them takes officers who are both trained and equipped for it. “Only a very small amount of officers in The Met are both trained to do so and have access to these bikes,” he said, and those officers are “generally deployed to street robbery hotspots on busier boroughs” rather than Putney. Put together with the night-hours gap, that is three separate reasons, in the police’s own document, for why this is close to uncatchable as things stand.

One victim’s badge, and one he didn’t notice was gone

One Putney.news reader thought the reversing camera on his BMW X1 needed a clean. It didn’t. The badge concealing it, and the sensor behind that, had simply been taken. He is one of at least seven Thamesfield drivers who found the same thing this week, on a night residents in the area’s community WhatsApp group describe as hitting several streets at once.

Volkswagen’s own response to victims looks inconsistent. One Thamesfield driver says VW reduced a £1,500 repair quote to £500 as what they called “a gesture of goodwill.” Another in the same street say they was offered no such reduction, and was quoted more by VW than the independent garage his insurer sent him to. Volkswagen UK’s position, given to the trade title Autocar in June, is that support is decided case by case and that thefts remain “a localised issue” concentrated in specific areas, including south London. That does not explain why two neighbours on the same street were treated so differently.

The same crime, 40 years apart, for two different reasons

This is not new, and it is not just a Putney problem. In the summer of 1987, Beastie Boys fans stripped VW badges off cars to wear as necklaces, copying a look worn by band member Mike D in the video for “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party).” The craze got bad enough that VW gave away free replacement badges to try to stop it. Almost 40 years later, the same badge is being stolen for the opposite reason: not to be seen wearing it, but because nobody is meant to know it is gone.

A larger, near-identical spree is under way in south-east London right now, where the Metropolitan Police say around 70 cars across 29 roads have been hit in a four-day stretch, some residents reporting drones scoping the streets beforehand. One victim there had his badge and sensor taken by two people on hire bikes in under five seconds, CCTV showed. “They harvested this area,” he said.

What you can do

If you drive a VW, Mercedes or BMW and park on the street, check your badge is still there. Police advice, direct from the alert: park somewhere secure where you can, use a Faraday pouch to block keyless entry signals, fit tamper-resistant screws where your car allows it, and use a Park Mark car park if you have one nearby. Report any theft to police with a crime number, both to help your insurance claim and because officers use the reports to track where this is happening.

Thamesfield’s next Ward Panel meeting is on Wednesday 2 September, 6:30pm to 8:30pm, on Putney High Street (SW15 1SN), and is open to residents who want to put this directly to police. Thamesfield’s three ward councillors are Ethan Brooks, Robert Morritt and Salvatore Murtas, all contactable via Wandsworth Council.

Police in Thamesfield first admitted they were largely powerless to stop vehicle theft here last October. Badge theft surfaced as a pattern in the ward five months ago, and cars on that same flagged street were hit again in July.