The epidemic of mobile-phone muggings is a bleak new low for London
It was 7pm last Friday. The Piccadilly line train, waiting at Hyde Park Corner, was packed with people heading towards the West End. Just as the Tube doors started beeping, indicating they were about to close, a man in a hood and a mask thundered along the carriage, thrust his leather gloves in my friend’s face, snatched her phone and dived off again. The timing was perfect; the audacity breathtaking. As the train pulled out seconds later, Holly could barely comprehend what had just happened to her. A woman sitting opposite burst into tears at the shock.
I still find it hard to fathom. It was early evening. Plenty of people were around, heading towards Green Park for dinners and weekend festivities. There are (supposedly) cameras on the underground network. It’s madly common now to hear of thieves on mopeds snatching mobile phones from pedestrians’ hands as they loiter on pavements. Around me in south-east London, parents have started organising rotas to accompany their kids home from school every afternoon because they’re sick of their phones being mugged (if yet another reason was needed to delay giving teenagers mobile phones, this is surely one of them). But on the Tube at 7pm? With so many witnesses? I don’t want to sound hysterical, but is this not a bleak new low?
Holly emerged at Green Park and explained what had happened to a Tube worker at the top of the escalators because she uses Apple Pay on her phone and couldn’t get through the gates without it. “I’ll let you through,” the TFL employee murmured, apparently not hugely bothered or surprised about what had happened underground. Holly also reported it to the police but, at the time of writing, was yet to hear anything back. “From what others have told me, I’ll get an email in a day or so saying ‘case closed’ because they can’t do anything about it.”
Her assailant, she presumes, must have been waiting at the other end of the carriage, scrutinising likely targets. If you happen to be on a Tube or train any time soon, glance around. You’ll notice that most people are on their phones. Many (most?) of us are now incapable of sitting peacefully on our journey or commute without constantly scrolling on it.
I often feel absurdly smug when I’m reading a book, but I’m quite as bad as everyone else with my phone at other moments. And anyway you can read books on phones now, so for all I know that commuter frowning at his iPhone is trudging through Dostoyevsky. Point being, we’re sitting ducks for modern day Artful Dodgers; babies in our seats, lost in our screens, entirely ignorant of what’s going on around us – whether it’s a woman standing in the aisle wearing a Baby on Board badge, or a thief.
According to the most recent figures, a phone is now pinched in London every six minutes. Given the stories one hears that almost doesn’t sound often enough to me. Every six seconds, surely? Having returned to the office this week and reported her Friday evening ordeal to colleagues, Holly was deluged with similar stories. One colleague has seen two phones snatched on Oxford Street recently; not so long ago, another had his mugged by one of the aforementioned moped opportunists.
Earlier this month, a businessman leaving the Houses of Parliament had his phone snatched by a robber on an electric bike, which are apparently also fuelling a rise in thefts since you can make a quick getaway on them, and e-bikes for hire now clutter every London pavement. Acting instinctively, the businessman bravely flung himself on the back wheel but caught his hand in the spokes and later needed 12 stitches in his hand and wrist after being gored. Although the bandit did throw back his phone, so not all was lost.
Over the weekend, it emerged that Sir Mo Farah has also recently taken on a phone thief by chasing a white van which had driven off with his. They, too, threw it back at him. But what if you’re not an Olympic athlete, or you don’t want to fling yourself on the back of a fast-moving e-bike? “It’s so depressing,” Hols said after the drama this week, “I feel a bit on edge.”
I felt the same after my phone was pilfered from my pocket a couple of Christmases ago. If people were still in the business of telling others they’d asked for it, then this could perhaps have applied to me since I’d had a few glasses of red wine, and I was crossing a packed Leicester Square. But the thief must have been quick (and presumably sober) since he only had a hundred metres or so to catch me before I tottered into the Tube station. Bang, my phone was gone. I had to fall on the mercy of another TFL worker to get home (how many are now begged by victims who can’t even get themselves out of a station because of the total reliance on our phones? For paying for things, for tickets, for directions, for everything).
It was an administrative nightmare for 24 hours as I tried to exist without it, but fortunately another phone was soon despatched thanks to insurance. I reported it to the police too, but only for a crime reference number because that’s what the insurers needed. I didn’t hear any follow up from the coppers, although I later traced my phone to an address not far from Leicester Square, and from there to Shenzhen, the tech hub which is often referred to as China’s Silicon Valley, where they’re resold or used for parts.
Perhaps we’ve all become far too casual about flashing around these devices, often worth over a thousand quid. But I don’t think we can be blamed for trying to do a few emails on the Tube on a Friday night. That can’t be “asking for it”, can it? But what can we do if masked men are now swaggering along carriages plucking phones from people’s hands like magpies, and we’re not as fast as Sir Mo?