‘They rob you visibly, with no repercussions’ – the unstoppable rise of London’s phone theft
October 9, 2024
‘They rob you visibly, with no repercussions’ – the unstoppable rise of London’s phone theft
by BulkyAccident
24 comments
They steal because they are not afraid of the consequences. Plain and simple.
We could solve this in a week. Make an extremely severe example of a few who are caught in sting operations.
Then you make repercussions. You install drone units with the ability to pursue suspects, you have active CCTV cameras you can use to trace their movements. You employ motorcycle police and knock the idiots off.
5 year prison sentence each and every time.
Just like shoplifting. They will continue to steal while there is no pushback. It needs to be stopped to the point where they fear doing it.
Apparently 58 thousand phones and bags are snatched in the city every year and the moron police spokesman, quoted in the article, basically says “it’s a big city, we have to live with it”.
When scooter hoodlums were terrorising well to do Chelsea types a few years ago, taking their cars etc, the met came down very hard on them, even ramming them off their bikes and that stopped it, but now the victims are mostly tourists, women so the met doesn’t seem to care.
Extreme tactics are needed to bring these phone snatchers down and out.
My phone was stolen and I tracked it to a council flat near me. Police refused to intervene and retrieve it.
A shame we can’t remotely detonate stolen phones. It would solve the issue quickly
Remember an interview I saw with one of the gang leaders. What he said was so blatantly obvious, but no-one seems to ever have caught on. Basically, he said that if you had £1200 cash on your person, you’d make sure you kept it out of sight. You wouldn’t walk around with it in your hand, waving it around, and you definitely wouldn’t leave it lying on a table out in the open in a coffee shop while you were distracted talking to your mate.
Police seem especially incompetent with this one.
Because with any financially motivated crime, generally it is a small amount of people committing many of the same crimes.
Plus to enable crime on this scale a whole infrastructure is required from buying the phones from the street level thieves to shipping then in bulk to China.
Use intelligence to find and target the repeat offenders and dismantle the supply chain.
But plod is like “duh don’t understand, crime happens!”
Lots of people suggesting we cut off thieves’ hands are overlooking the fact that the police would still have to catch them in the first place.
My best mate’s phone was nicked by a dude on a bike 2 months ago, while he was running behind the guy to catch him the thief took the phone from another lady on his route….
So far no solid leads from police on both the cases.
I’m so confused by this paragraph:
>Many people also cite ebikes as a factor, by-the-minute hires such as Lime that can accelerate getaway speeds, but the Met estimates that only 3% of snatch thefts are by moped, 6% by pedal bike. It’s possible that the feat of this kind of theft is so memorable that people tell more vivid stories about it.
Does that mean 91% of thefts are done by ebikes??
There needs to be a clear response to that, one can not be paranoid to lose your own stuff just because you happen to be in a city.
We need to poverty and inequality to address this. It’s not about locking people up.
If they try to rob me visibly they’ll be getting slammed into the closest wall, visibly
The police treat each theft like an isolated incident so they can put it into their “can’t be bothered” pile, rather than joining the dots to the pretty obvious assumption that everyone who snatches a phone has snatched several before and the fences they offload them to deal with hundreds of devices.
If they did that, the scale of the crimes that a small number of criminals are committing would mean they had to act.
As much as these phone thieves are terrible people. People don’t half make themselves easy targets, by walking mindlessly, staring at their phones like zombies. The amount of people I have to shout “LOOK UP” to before they walk into me or someone else or even blindly into the road ffs! Its ridiculous.
People really need to have more awareness, as having their phone nicked isn’t even the worst that could happen
I’m curious to know if this only affects iPhone users. As an Android (Google Pixel) user, I thought one benefit of using Android is that the phone is a theft-deterrent and a gold-digger-avoidant.
My phone was stolen on the early hours of New Years Day two years ago and they somehow managed to hack into my Monzo and take all my money.
Called the police, they did the bare minimum. A few days later I got a call from this run down, random phone shop in East London and when I called back, they said it was a mistake but it was most definitely the place where the thieves had sold my phone.
I said this to the police and they did NOTHING. I was tempted to go down there myself and demand answers but was persuaded against it by friends but I regret that now.
The MET are useless.
Lol this article is a mess in regards to the e-bikes.
The e-bikes that are used are NOT typically lime bikes that have a top speed of about 18mph if you pedal really hard. They use e-bikes that require no pedalling to reach 30mph.
I’ve also seen 6 phone snatchings or attempted and every single time it’s fully black clothes on a personal e-bike not lime.
[removed]
Walking around London is the only practical use I’ve found for my smart watch lol. It has all my notifications, and has Google maps. Before coming to London I couldn’t figure out when you’d need one if you can just use your phone…now I know
Police won’t do a single thing. The only reason to report it to them is for insurance
This is why I slap princess stickers all over my phone and use sand paper to rough up a few corners to make it look shit. No ones nicking this 😄
24 comments
They steal because they are not afraid of the consequences. Plain and simple.
We could solve this in a week. Make an extremely severe example of a few who are caught in sting operations.
Then you make repercussions. You install drone units with the ability to pursue suspects, you have active CCTV cameras you can use to trace their movements. You employ motorcycle police and knock the idiots off.
5 year prison sentence each and every time.
Just like shoplifting. They will continue to steal while there is no pushback. It needs to be stopped to the point where they fear doing it.
Apparently 58 thousand phones and bags are snatched in the city every year and the moron police spokesman, quoted in the article, basically says “it’s a big city, we have to live with it”.
When scooter hoodlums were terrorising well to do Chelsea types a few years ago, taking their cars etc, the met came down very hard on them, even ramming them off their bikes and that stopped it, but now the victims are mostly tourists, women so the met doesn’t seem to care.
Extreme tactics are needed to bring these phone snatchers down and out.
My phone was stolen and I tracked it to a council flat near me. Police refused to intervene and retrieve it.
A shame we can’t remotely detonate stolen phones. It would solve the issue quickly
Remember an interview I saw with one of the gang leaders. What he said was so blatantly obvious, but no-one seems to ever have caught on. Basically, he said that if you had £1200 cash on your person, you’d make sure you kept it out of sight. You wouldn’t walk around with it in your hand, waving it around, and you definitely wouldn’t leave it lying on a table out in the open in a coffee shop while you were distracted talking to your mate.
Police seem especially incompetent with this one.
Because with any financially motivated crime, generally it is a small amount of people committing many of the same crimes.
Plus to enable crime on this scale a whole infrastructure is required from buying the phones from the street level thieves to shipping then in bulk to China.
Use intelligence to find and target the repeat offenders and dismantle the supply chain.
But plod is like “duh don’t understand, crime happens!”
Lots of people suggesting we cut off thieves’ hands are overlooking the fact that the police would still have to catch them in the first place.
My best mate’s phone was nicked by a dude on a bike 2 months ago, while he was running behind the guy to catch him the thief took the phone from another lady on his route….
I myself got into a physical fight with a thief on the tube trying to steal from 2 unaware girls and shared the story here https://www.reddit.com/r/london/s/IGDcBboeax
So far no solid leads from police on both the cases.
I’m so confused by this paragraph:
>Many people also cite ebikes as a factor, by-the-minute hires such as Lime that can accelerate getaway speeds, but the Met estimates that only 3% of snatch thefts are by moped, 6% by pedal bike. It’s possible that the feat of this kind of theft is so memorable that people tell more vivid stories about it.
Does that mean 91% of thefts are done by ebikes??
There needs to be a clear response to that, one can not be paranoid to lose your own stuff just because you happen to be in a city.
We need to poverty and inequality to address this. It’s not about locking people up.
If they try to rob me visibly they’ll be getting slammed into the closest wall, visibly
The police treat each theft like an isolated incident so they can put it into their “can’t be bothered” pile, rather than joining the dots to the pretty obvious assumption that everyone who snatches a phone has snatched several before and the fences they offload them to deal with hundreds of devices.
If they did that, the scale of the crimes that a small number of criminals are committing would mean they had to act.
This shouldn’t of cracked me up- but it did.
Mike Graham [wrote that he reported a phone theft](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/26/my-phone-was-stolen-what-came-next-was-somehow-worse/) in person to a police officer, who replied that his own phone had been snatched the week before *while he was in uniform*, and the best thing to do was fill in an online form.
As much as these phone thieves are terrible people. People don’t half make themselves easy targets, by walking mindlessly, staring at their phones like zombies. The amount of people I have to shout “LOOK UP” to before they walk into me or someone else or even blindly into the road ffs! Its ridiculous.
People really need to have more awareness, as having their phone nicked isn’t even the worst that could happen
I’m curious to know if this only affects iPhone users. As an Android (Google Pixel) user, I thought one benefit of using Android is that the phone is a theft-deterrent and a gold-digger-avoidant.
My phone was stolen on the early hours of New Years Day two years ago and they somehow managed to hack into my Monzo and take all my money.
Called the police, they did the bare minimum. A few days later I got a call from this run down, random phone shop in East London and when I called back, they said it was a mistake but it was most definitely the place where the thieves had sold my phone.
I said this to the police and they did NOTHING. I was tempted to go down there myself and demand answers but was persuaded against it by friends but I regret that now.
The MET are useless.
Lol this article is a mess in regards to the e-bikes.
The e-bikes that are used are NOT typically lime bikes that have a top speed of about 18mph if you pedal really hard. They use e-bikes that require no pedalling to reach 30mph.
I’ve also seen 6 phone snatchings or attempted and every single time it’s fully black clothes on a personal e-bike not lime.
[removed]
Walking around London is the only practical use I’ve found for my smart watch lol. It has all my notifications, and has Google maps. Before coming to London I couldn’t figure out when you’d need one if you can just use your phone…now I know
Police won’t do a single thing. The only reason to report it to them is for insurance
This is why I slap princess stickers all over my phone and use sand paper to rough up a few corners to make it look shit. No ones nicking this 😄