The phrase 'apprehend thieves' is correct and can be used in written English.
You can use this phrase when you want to express that someone is trying to catch and detain a thief or thieves. For example: The police were able to apprehend the thieves who had broken into the house.
The FTPA still provides support to foreign visitors, but its scope has been widened to include duties such as stopping bar fights and apprehending thieves.
"This was a two-pronged approach to apprehend both thieves and receivers of stolen property," Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.
Wimsey, based on the character in Dorothy L. Sayers's novel, helped apprehend the thieves before going off to serve in World War I, but the necklace remains missing.
For example, we've helped police departments with narcotics investigations and in apprehending car thieves and a serial rapist.
The cops apprehended the thieves, booked them for shoplifting, and soon released them on misdemeanor charges — typical in shoplifting cases.
Though some of the thieves are apprehended quickly, others are never caught.
To read the statements made by British and Dutch officials after the arrest of a group of bootleggers in suburbs of London and Amsterdam on Friday, one would think that the police had apprehended a band of thieves who for the last three decades had been sitting on a vast trove of long-lost master tapes from Beatles recording sessions.
Last month, Russia's Federal Security Service (FSS) says it apprehended a group of thieves who had allegedly stolen precious components for a space station module.
He reports that "Modern accounts pretend to say, it [the gibbet] was for all sorts of felons; but I am well assured, it was first erected purely, or at least principally, for such thieves as were apprehended stealing cloth from the tenters; and it seems very reasonable to think it was so".
Either way, the thieves were almost immediately tackled and apprehended while trying to leave the Tower.
