By Samuel Lovett
Publication Date: 2026-05-02 16:50:00
Chinese crime gangs are evading police because too few officers speak Mandarin or Cantonese and instead rely on Google Translate, a report recently declassified by the Home Office has found.
Offenders running prostitution rings and smuggling drugs avoid arrest because of police’s “very poor” understanding of Chinese organised crime groups, according to research based on interviews with officials from 14 law enforcement agencies.
Police struggle to deploy undercover officers to disrupt gang activities or infiltrate WeChat, a Chinese messaging platform that is the “backbone” of the groups’ operations, and routinely feed sensitive communications into “insecure” open-source tools such as Google Translate.
“We always talk about dismantling OCGs [organised crime groups] but in terms of the Chinese it is too big, we have no chance,” an anonymised officer told the report’s author, David Wilson, a regional co-ordinator for the organised immigration…
