MPS admits it did not respond to Hatton Garden intruder alarm

The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) has confirmed it decided not to respond to a call from an intruder alarm at the Hatton Garden Safety Deposit company during the Easter weekend when a multi-million pound burglary took place.

At 12.21am on Good Friday, the MPS Central Communications Command received a call from Southern Monitoring Alarm Company confirming that an intruder alarm had been activated at the Hatton Garden Safety Deposit in Central London.

The call was recorded and transferred to the force’s computer aided dispatch system where it was graded as requiring no police response.

On Tuesday morning after the Bank Holiday weekend, officers were called to the company when the burglary was discovered. The thieves had forced open around 70 safety deposit boxes. Experts believe the value of items stolen could be as much as £200 million.

The MPS is investigating why the call grade was applied and said it was too early to say if the handling of the call would have had an impact on the outcome of the incident.

There has been speculation that the MPS may have believed the alarm was connected to a large fire in underground tunnels in Holborn that took 36 hours to put out.

The Association of Chief Police Officers guidance on responding to security systems, issued to forces in April 2014, says that police response is ultimately determined by the nature of demand, priorities and resources which exist at the time a request for a response is received.

Detective Chief Inspector Paul Johnson, the officer in charge of the investigation, said the scene inside the vault was “chaotic”.

“The vault was covered in dust and debris and the floor strewn with discarded safety deposit boxes and numerous power tools, including an angle grinder, concrete drills and crowbars,” he said.

“Officers are gathering and examining CCTV footage to identify any possible leads. We are still forensically examining the scene for evidence. This is a painstaking process but is essential to ensure we can gather as much evidence and opportunities to identify the thieves.”

It is believed the intruders disabled the communal lift on the second floor and then used the lift shaft to climb down into the basement.

Once inside they forced open the shutter doors into the basement and drilled through two metres of reinforced concrete to enter the vault.

The MPS said it is still in the process of identifying the owners of the safety deposit boxes and is contacting them to take statements and establish what has been stolen.

Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, former head of the Flying Squad John O’Connor, criticised the call handling procedure for such events.

“They’re so rigid in the way that they apply the rules if there have been a couple of false alarms, “ he said.

“A passover on a fortified building containing a vault with safety deposit boxes and you don’t respond to it – I can’t believe they could be so utterly incompetent.”