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Bang to rights! The West Midlands Police have a reason to be cheerful today after they arrested a gang of three people who were in the process of trying to steal Openreach’s (BT) copper broadband and phone cables from an underground site in central Birmingham, which most likely caused some significant and costly connectivity problems for locals.
Firearms officers who were patrolling nearby were flagged down by observant members of the public as a group of men were trying to steal cables on Great Charles Queensway at around 7.30pm on Tuesday (20th Jan 2026). Two men were immediately arrested on suspicion of theft at the scene, and a van carrying cables was also recovered.
Shortly after that a third suspect was identified as still being underground, and officers, with the help of Police Dog Riot, “encouraged him to climb up the ladder and onto the street, where he was also arrested on suspicion of theft.” The video pasted below does a good job of depicting this part of the event. Three men, aged 48, 45 and 37, remain in custody today.
Criminal gangs like this are often known to commit multiple thefts, frequently hitting parts of the same region several times before moving on. Suffice to say that these arrests may well have helped to prevent a string of similar incidents in the area and could potentially end up being linked to past events.
Det Supt Dave Sproson, of Birmingham Police, said: “This was a fantastic response from our firearms, dogs and Birmingham officers, in bringing three suspects into custody quickly.”
Crimes like this have become increasingly common in recent years, driven in part by the high price of copper and the rising cost of living. But the criminals are also coming under pressure from a rise in the number of UK-wide arrests (examples here and here), which are often followed by some convictions.
Openreach also reported a 30% reduction in cable theft during 2023/24 after introducing a new forensic liquid marker (SelectaDNA) to help track and protect their network (here), although it doesn’t cover older cables that are already in the ground.
The ongoing deployment of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband lines should, eventually, help to reduce such thefts as fibre has no value to thieves. But this won’t completely stop the problem from occurring because fibre and copper cables often share some of the same ducts (i.e. damaging one also damages the other), and thieves sometimes confuse the two. Completely removing core copper cables will take quite a few years.
Credits to one of our readers, Shaukat, for the news tip.