Foreign visitors may be bemused by our relatively toothless bobbies with their funny hats and ineffectual truncheons, but the truth is they can't always be trusted when packing heat. A female officer has been removed from operational duty after she left her firearm in an Edgware Road Starbucks. With a bladder perhaps filled with one of the chain's venti soy frappucinos, the officer, who has not been identified but whose surname is suspected to......

66(6)! The Coventry Street Vampire It is a case obscure, hardly spoken of. Whilst the legend of the Highgate 'vampire' continues to intrigue and be discussed, something just as wicked occurred several decades before, in the West End at Coventry Street. In 1922 a giant bat-like creature had been seen in the vicinity of West Drayton Church, as I have mentioned before, and some believed it was the vampyric spirit of a creature once......

"Junior Kickstart" was one of our favourite BBC shows with an awesome bumpy theme tune and kids on Honda 50ccs squealing through muddy courses and over unfeasibly challenging obstacles. Twenty years later, in a sad twist of fate, off-road motorbikes are to be employed by the police to crack down on bored kids with nothing better to do than throw stones at trains, drink cider in railway sidings and generally cause problems on the......

There were tears before bedtime yesterday when a Facebook "splashmob" got a little out of hand and resulted in 9 people being arrested. The ES pictures show a jolly group of plastic bazooka armed lovelies frolicking in the evening sun enjoying a refreshing water fight but the BBC reports that the “high spirited” aquatic combat scared horses, unseating some small children riding nearby, so the rozzers were sent in to break up the fun. There’s......

Here's a rap sheet to be proud of: Earl Petrie has been charged with (deep breath) grievous bodily harm, dangerous driving, driving without insurance, driving without an appropriate licence, failing to stop at an accident, cruelty to animals, and having a dog dangerously out of control. The 33-year old was charged with this orgy of offences after he attacked a cop in Richmond Park when the officer intervened in a row over a disabled parking......

Occasionally an event happens so spirit-sappingly depressing to make us wonder if those millenarian, "hell in a handcart", death knell-sounding types in the Mail's employ might actually have a point after all. Here's one: two cops are on sick leave following an attack by a mob in Croydon, after they had the temerity to ask a 15-year old girl to pick up her litter. The mob, some 30 people strong and made up largely......

Disgruntled motorists in well-to-do Crouch End have become so irate at bits of their flashy cars being stripped off that the police have come up with a new tactic: decoy BMWs to catch thieves red-handed. While your car radio and alloy wheels used to be the only parts at risk from thieves with socket sets, the prices that high-end car parts can fetch on the black market means that all sorts of bits are......

61. Voodoo? There are many misconceptions of so-called 'witchcraft', which is in fact an ancient, harmless worship of nature – but pick up any book previous to the 1990s and such a word will nearly always be connected to bloody tales of black witchery, grim sorcery and diabolical summoning. The press have long misunderstood white and black magic, choosing to mingle instead of separate the two, so such confusion remains today. Many 'satanic panics'......

Reports that hate crime is on the rise don't really surprise us. In the wake of the earlier shocking news about the murdered French students and the relentless wave of violent crime we seem to be riding at the moment, we're not really feeling the love at all. However, Barnet is specifically reporting a 20% increase in reported race crime, whilst other boroughs report a decline. Statistics, of course, can be wonderfully open to......

Get Dixon of Dock Green on the blower. See if DCI Burnside of Sun Hill is still kicking about ('Tosh isn't, sadly). A lack of security staff for the 2012 Games has led a senior police figure to recommend that veteran officers are brought out of retirement for the Olympics. Having outlined a £600 million pound security plan earlier in the year, officials are now concerned that there simply won't be enough able and......

Whilst British ladies hopeful Elena Baltacha's out on Court 2 today and homegrown Chris Eaton's making tantalisingly promising progress into round 2 elsewhere, a dedicated police squad are cracking down on ticket touts outside the All England Club and removing obsessive fans to a safe distance. We gave you the lowdown on how to get hold of legitimate tickets for the tennis on Monday but with all that tedious queuing, touts are always going......

Oh, Facebook. Something about being on the site just calls for people to post inappropriate photos and divulge private information that should probably be left off the interwebs. Even the police aren't immune to the lures of the Facebook Spill-Your-Guts Demon -- 18 officers were recently reprimanded for bragging about collisions and hurting members of the public in a group called "Yes I've had a POLCOL." All we could find of the group were three......

Police stormed Le Cordon Bleu cookery school in Marylebone yesterday evening following a stand off with a knife wielding student threatening to kill himself unless he was allowed to retake the intermediate course exam he had failed. The distressed chef, who'd apparently spent all of his savings on the internationally renowned course, ultimately had to be tasered by riot police after 4 hours of attempted negotiations. Others picked up on this tragic, pathetic and......

Those good people at Friction TV sent us this video of Saturday night's drinking party on the tube. Our Nice Liz's experience was "safe and fun". This footage shows another side to the evening. We didn't even make it onto the tube because we were tardy and the stations were shut by the time we rocked up with a bottle of wine and our party frocks. Were you there? What was your experience? embededPlayer(3231, 3546,......

54. Something Strange In Southwark On the morning of Tuesday 22nd April 2008 I met up with Paul Ross and JoAnne Good on their BBC Radio Breakfast Show to discuss sightings of mysterious creatures roaming the capital. After the talk, which was very well received, I went home, checked my mail and was stunned when I found a report sent by a Mr Burns, who claimed that on the same morning, but during the......

While all eyes were fixed on Moscow last night, the Russians braced for a traditional British hooligan rampage, trouble actually flared up closer to home on Fulham Broadway. Disgruntled Chelsea fans gathered there after their team crashed out of the Champions' League final on penalties, and with a crushing inevitability clashes with police broke out soon afterwards. Around 400 fans surged into the street after Anelka missed the final penalty of the game, blocking......

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, chances are it's a ... This was our thought upon reading the news that a teenage member of Scientology-protesting group Anonymous, who goes by the name EpicNoseGuy on the Enturbulation forums, had his sign confiscated at the May 10th anti-"Church" of Scientology protest in Queen Victoria Street by the City of London police, and has been issued with a......

Operation Blunt 2 cracking down on knife crime made its first big arrest on Saturday night on the top deck of a bus in Deptford. An astonishing 24 teenagers were stopped and searched after boarding the bus en masse and police officers recovered the following makeshift arsenal: six knives, two screwdrivers, a corkscrew, a golf club, a metal baseball bat, a mallet, two wrench handles, a claw hammer and a metal bar were found......

We can't help but be impressed by Boris Johnson's bid to deliver as many of his manifesto pledges as possible in his Mayoral settling in stage. First the tube booze ban, then scrapping The Londoner. Today he's announcing an extra 440 police staff on the buses - his headline promise on transport. Safer Transport Teams were launched in 2005 and in March last year Ken Livingstone stumped up for an additional 400 PCSOs to......

It was one of Boris Johnson's election pledges to bring in mobile weapons scanners and knife detector arches and today saw them appearing at tube stations and on London's streets as a very public and visual response to the knife crime murders of the past week. As one astute Londonist reader has pointed out, where was the swift resort to "in your face" policing after the unfortunate teenage girl was allegedly covered in lye......

In the interest of being seen to do something, the Met today announced a ramp up of "stop and search" powers in "areas blighted by stabbings". That's pretty much everywhere in London, then. Assistant Commissioner Tim Godwin admitted that the measures would be "fairly in your face." Apparently the deployment of the 15 strong team had been planned for some time and now rushed forward as a reaction to the latest, depressing string of......

So, it seems that Steven Bigby who was just 22, was killed over a drink being thrown outside McDonald's on Oxford Street yesterday. Steven died in hospital from a stab wound to the chest. The police are not treating the incident as gang related or premeditated, but are looking for "Four men, who were black and aged between 20 and 30, [who] fled the scene after the attack." Anyone who took photographs of the scene......

A man in his 20s was fatally stabbed yesterday evening, in broad daylight, outside McDonalds on Oxford Street. The incident happened at the beginning of rush hour, around 17.00, when the area must have been packed with hot, shoppy people who could have witnessed the incident. Police are talking to those on the scene and examining CCTV footage. It seems the young man had been in McDonalds and was subsequently involved in an altercation outside.......

Exactly what caused last Thursday's explosion in a residential street in South Harrow is still being investigated. Some of the evacuated residents have now been allowed to return to their homes but police forensic experts continue to examine the site of the incident which demolished one house and badly damaged 2 others last Wednesday. Emmad Qureshi, 26, was killed in the explosion. A teenage girl and another man remain in hospital. The intrigue around......

Last night's shoot out in Markham Square, near the Kings Road, ended with the police taking out the gunman. The BBC reports the 32 year old gunman (or gun maniac if you're reading the Sun) firing at police between 17.00 and 21.30 with the police returning fire on each occasion. Once the gunman was pronounced dead, the incident was reported to the Independent Police Complaints Commission for investigation at 21.50. There's no news on what......

Reassured by the omnipresent CCTV cameras that train their Cyclops vision on London's populace as they go about their business? Neither are we, particularly now that a senior police officer has claimed they don't cut crime Back in January we reported that London now boasts some 10,000 cameras, and Britain as a whole ranks first in the EU for "endemic surveillance". Yet Detective Chief Inspector Mike Neville says that barely 3% of robberies on......

Okay, confession time: Londonist hasn't always been particularly supportive toward London's police community support officers. In fact, judging by our generally disdainful tone, you might imagine that we think they're nothing more than well-meaning but ineffectual quota-fillers with nary a backbone nor a shred of common sense among them. Well, we've issued ourselves a stern ticking off and decided to right that wrong by bringing you the news that three PCSOs have been recommended......

The hard-working men and women of the Met deserve snazzy, comfortable outfits, and who better to help spruce up their uniforms than the fashion forward students at the London College of Fashion? Back in January, we told you about a contest for the fashion students to help redesign the uniforms for the Met. Well, the results are in. While most changes are small, practical adjustments -- for example, giving female officers the option of......

50. The Lioness Of Winchmore Hill On Tuesday 22nd April I appeared on BBC London Radio with JoAnne Goode and Paul Ross to discuss mystery big cats around London, so what better way to celebrate reaching the fiftieth Saturday Strangeness installment than with another 'big cat' tale from the capital... In the March of 1994 there were reports that a lioness was on the loose in North London and had been sighted by a......

A conflict of interest has forced a Walthamstow police officer to resign. Manjit Johal, formerly a sergeant, was found guilty of sampling the wares of a brothel he was investigating in December 2005. Johal had originally gone to the establishment to determine whether or not it was being used for prostitution, and managed to verify in the least sensible way possible that it was indeed. Originally arrested under the suspicion of rape, Johal was......