Apple and London's Metropolitan Police are blaming each other for a failure to cut the number of iPhone thefts in the UK capital.

There have been successes in fighting thefts of iPhones, including the recent use of Find My to smash a major smartphone theft ring. But the Met police have blamed Apple before, and it isn't stopping.

According to The Telegraph, the Met says that Apple has full access to its National Mobile Phone Register (NMPR), a database of stolen devices. It's claimed that Apple uses this access daily, but not for its intended purpose.

"Apple already [has] access to NMPR and use it every day to check the network status of trade in devices," the Met is reported to have told UK government, "but they do not check for theft or take action."

The report isn't clear — it also says that Apple does not monitor NMPR for traded-in devices — but the overall claim is that Apple is ignoring the problem of theft. Reportedly, more than 80,000 phones were stolen in London during 2024, although it isn't known how many were iPhones.

Apple has previously told the Met that it should get on with "traditional policing" and catch the thieves, which doubtlessly went down well.

"I would want to make sure that as part of all of that the Met Police continues to do traditional policing," Apple's Gary Davis said in June 2025, "which means sending requests to us for stolen devices and Apple responding to those requests for stolen devices. We are not seeing that."

In response to the latest claim, Apple is said to have highlighted its features such as Stolen Device Protection. The company has also, though, now said that it is considering whether to block an iPhone once it is registered as stolen.

That would mean blocking the phone's IMEI identifier. And Apple cautions that doing this could still lead to abuse by people falsely claiming to be the user.

London's Met police have now also said that there are increasing links between smartphone theft and knife crime, drugs, and child exploitation gangs.

This is just the latest in an ongoing disagreement between the Met and Apple. In 2023, the London mayor demanded that both Apple and Google introduce specific security measures — that both had already had in place for years.