Art and Antiques Unit

The Metropolitan Police Art and Antiques Unit is a small branch of the Specialist, Organised and Economic Crime Command within London's Metropolitan Police Service. Its purpose is to investigate art theft, illegal trafficking in cultural property and fraud. The unit was established in 1969, was dissolved and reformed in the mid 1980s, and was reformed again after the 2005 London bombings and the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire. It keeps the London Stolen Arts Database, which records thousands of stolen cultural items. Its work led to the 1997 prosecution of Jonathan Tokeley-Parry for smuggling Egyptian antiquities and to the 2007 sentencing of the forger Shaun Greenhalgh, and in 2019 it helped return seized artefacts to Afghanistan. It is far smaller than Italy's Carabinieri art squad.