I was in London recently carrying a simple piece of kit I never thought I would need: a lanyard tethering my phone to my wrist. This would make it harder for my mobile to be snatched from my hands on the street by latest scourge plaguing London: gangs of masked young men on e-bikes targeting pedestrians for their phones.
This phenomenon has threatened to make our capital’s premier shopping destinations no-go areas for worried pedestrians. Only 1 per cent of reported phone thefts from hotspots like Oxford street result in a conviction. In recent years, the Met police have been accused of indifference to the crime, which had reached record levels, increasing 84 per cent between 2021 and 2024. Over 70,000 handsets were snatched in 2024, sent abroad to China to feed a burgeoning criminal industry of reprogramming and selling on stolen phones. Back in London, the West End is plastered with roadside warnings to ‘mind the grab’, cementing the feeling that phone theft is an insuperable reality. The onus seemingly is on the law-abiding to protect themselves rather than the criminal gangs to fear being caught.
But here is a good news story to buck the trend. Over the last year, the Met have responded to this well-deserved criticism with a concerted effort to bring the fight to the mobile phone snatchers. Using intelligence-led policing, more resources, new technology and robust follow-up, phone thefts in London in the last year have sharply fallen for the first time since the pandemic.
It is awful that the image of London as an unsafe place to visit has gained an international audience
The police are claiming a 30 per cent reduction in the West End alone. Cops are now equipped with bikes as fast and agile as the opposition. Police drones are being sent up to hover over hot spots and live facial recognition spots repeat offenders. Videos supplied by the Met show police raids, with doors smashed in and dozens of people arrested. Thousands of hot handsets have been recovered.
From a situation of near impunity, the streets have become appreciably more hostile to the phone thieves. But the absence of cooperation between mobile phone manufacturers and airtime providers on security means that there is still a huge market and profit margin for stolen phones. Organised criminals will react rationally to a dynamic threat from law enforcement. We can see this in the disproportionate numbers of young people who are being arrested in connection with this theft. Youths are being recruited online with big rewards for snatching high-value phones. These juvenile offenders will often go on to feed a voracious criminal supply chain of ever-escalating seriousness, from county lines drug dealing to serious acts of violence. They wreck their own futures and create more victims in the process.
A key problem that is hampering real and enduring progress on phone theft is, however, beyond the control of police or prosecutors. Sir Mark Rowley, the Met’s commissioner, has been complaining about failures by the rest of the criminal justice system to get a grip. Speaking yesterday as the Met released their latest data, he said:
We also need the courts to play their part by preventing repeat offenders being bailed only to go out and offend again, undermining the hard work officers are doing to keep communities safe.
This is understandable, but hardly realistic given the state of intervention services for young people who are driving the front end of phone theft. Local authority youth offending teams, established nearly three decades ago, have never recovered from the austerity-era cuts which decimated early prevention work and left statutory supervision of young offenders in tatters.
Centrally funded initiatives like the Turnaround Programme, started by the Ministry of Justice in 2022, poured millions into identifying and diverting children at risk of offending, achieving tangible results. Stopping children from climbing onto bicycles to target others in traumatic crimes is better and more cost-effective than transforming them into better criminals with a spell in our violent and disordered child custody system.
In the meantime, phone companies should and could do much more to permanently render stolen phones incapable of being repurposed and sold on. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has also faced accusations of trying to deflect blame for the capital’s phone theft epidemic onto anyone other than himself.
It is awful that the image of London as an unsafe place to visit because of phone theft has gained an international audience. Embarrassment is increasingly the only way we can get public services and the politicians in charge of them to react. What the Met has shown is that it is capable of robust action to deal with a crime that has a powerful hold on how people who live, work and visit central London feel about their personal security. Behavioural changes alone cannot explain this success. The Met have put criminals on the back foot for once. Long may it continue.
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