Police to be allowed to search properties without warrant for stolen phones in England and Wales

>The change to warrants would let police enter somewhere if location tagging shows that a stolen item is there and it is “not practicable” to get a warrant from a court. Previously, ministers had talked about speeding up the warrant process.

>This would particularly target phone theft, where someone’s “find my phone” function shows it is at a particular address, but would cover any stolen item that could be located using mobile signal, wifi, Bluetooth or tracking devices such as an AirTag, such as vehicles or farm machinery.

>A Home Office statement announcing the bill said this change would allow police to “act swiftly in the ‘golden hour’ of investigations”, meaning more stolen property could be retrieved.

Not sure how I feel about bypassing the warrant process altogether.

We don’t tend to care much about warrants in this country – police have quite broad powers to force entry without a warrant – but I think this is one such case where it should be necessary.

Obviously, the justice system is on its knees so getting warrants probably takes ages, which is probably the main reason why this new warrantless power has been brought in.

It does sound like the government has gone down the easier path of removing safeguards and trampling on people’s rights rather than the harder path of properly funding the justice system.

The bill hasn’t been published yet, so we don’t know exactly what safeguards there are on this power yet – it doesn’t sound like a completely unrestricted power.

This sounds good and practical. There are lots of circumstances where police can enter a property without a warrant and this one just makes sense.

“I have nothing hide” folks once again screwing us over.

Provided it has limitations on the search powers that can be exercises, I think this is a good idea.

Imagine how many posts there are of people that have tracked their phones to a flat and can hear it ringing but the police “won’t do anything”.

I think this should empower them to go and retrieve a ringing phone, but it probably shouldn’t allow them to start rooting through drawers, which would prevent them from really catching most thieves I imagine.

This is one of those thin ends of the wedge issues.

No this is a literal Trojan Horse. It’s to enable police to enter any property without a warrant. You should write to your MP and let them know what you think.

Why not issue warrants faster? This bill makes no sense.

Fuck this off. The amount of stories I’ve read about phones being confiscated and then lost by police or laptops confiscated and then used by the staff (or staff families) is too numerous.

I have a bad feeling that suddenly a lot of places they couldn’t get warrants for might all of a sudden have a stolen phone at the address. 

Roll on 3 years and it turns out the police using phones from the evidence room to carry out illegal searches… my guess is in Manchester

There are plenty of crimes already covered by law where the police could act but don’t, so I fail to see how any of this will improve things. No doubt, it’ll just mean more laws on “hurty words” buried in the legislation.

I doubt this is going to be used for one person’s phone being stolen, I assume it’ll be when they’ve gathered tracking data for a large amount of phones in a specific location/property.

This is a good thing, it’s all very well moaning about stuff like this but this means these thieves can be targeted quicker, they won’t just have 1 phone on them and in reality they will probably have off loaded it already but it’s not a bad thing IMO.

The first thing any competant thief does is turn off the phone after they get it to switch off it’s tracker and remote bricking capability.

This sounds like an upgrade to “you match the description'”