CAN ANYONE STOP THE MOPED MONSTERS?
Brazen. Using hammers and acid. Making up to £1,000 an hour. Terrifying families on the school run, savage moped gangs have turned one mother’s leafy suburb into a warzone
NoT a lot usually happens in my street. It’s a terrace of Victorian houses where London becomes more leafy — lived in by lawyers, City people and media types.
Here, bay trees in china pots stand sentry next to Farrow & Ball-painted front doors. Estate agents gush over the ‘elegantly appointed homes with panoramic views of the city below’ and hope to get £1.5 million for them.
Life revolves around ‘the village’, Highgate, a short walk away, where several of the bijou shops and cafes still have the curved, small-paned fronts they had when Dickens lodged up here.
In the ten years I’ve lived in this area, there’s been the usual opportunist crime. From time to time, my glove compartment gets rifled through if I forget to lock the car. one year, my Christmas wreath vanished from my Palma Grey-coloured front door.
I took it in my stride. It seemed like the premium you paid for living on the edge of one of the world’s most dynamic cities.
Then, this summer, something started to change. Usually the messages on the community Facebook pages I subscribe to are requests for recommendations for reliable handymen, second-hand Bugaboos or appeals for lost cats.
Now every second or third was about moped gangs — who had already brought terror to Central London with their attacks using hammers, acid and even guns.
There were sightings of them zigzagging across the newly pedestrianized area outside our tube station, or reports that yet another neighbour had their phone snatched walking home.
Then accounts started to appear of raiders storming into shops and cafes to snatch laptops from the unsuspecting customers sitting in the windows. Then they stopped being warnings. They became real. Coming out of the gym at 9pm three weeks ago, I saw a professional-looking man in a suit at the bus stop, open-mouthed as two scooter thieves — one driving, the other snatching — stole his phone with seamless ease before swerving off up Archway Road.
The next evening my husband Anthony arrived home to tell me he narrowly avoided being hit by another moped pair on the pavement in search of more targets.
Later that week, my 12-year-old daughter Clio got back from school to breathlessly recount how two boys came off the High Street at speed on a moped behind her, wearing balaclavas and waving iPhones, shouting: ‘We’ve f****** got two,’ before slowing down to see if she had a third to add to their collection.
Three days later, the brothers who run the grocery store 50 yards from my front door described how a woman chased by a moped gang ran inside to shake them off.
Thwarted, two minutes later the same two thugs picked on a lawyer in his 30s walking to his workplace after lunch. When he refused to hand over his watch, they smashed his knees with a hammer, causing a hair-line fracture on one leg, which meant he had to take two weeks off work.
When I posted a warning online, an old friend replied with more news. Patty, a music teacher, told me she was in a branch of Waitrose at 9.30pm earlier in the week when two boys on mountain bikes came in and rode up and down the aisles as if the supermarket was their personal slalom course.
Next my 33-year-old sister Kara chimed in to say she’d been mugged for her iPhone 6 on her way home by a youth riding on the pavement. All this over the course of a fortnight. And when a cafe on the High Street had its windows smashed by moped thugs with hammers I started to feel I was living in the Wild West.
Mothers waiting to collect their children from school at 3pm told how tables were upended as they fled for cover, some carrying toddlers. I could go on, but you get the picture. Even trying to remain sanguine about this, the statistics on moped crime where I live are astonishing.
My borough, Islington, is the second-worst hit in London. There have been 3,587 incidents of crime involving mopeds since the start of the year. The adjoining boroughs of Camden and Haringey have experienced almost 9,000.
FRoMJune 2016 to 2017, Londoners suffered 16,158 crimes involving powered-two-wheel vehicles overall, more than triple the amount (5,145 incidents) the year before. And that’s not taking into account the failed attempts, the intimidation or the muggings committed on pedal bikes.
Yet it’s not the fear of having my phone grappled from my hand which is changing the way I live.
What’s truly frightening is that these crimes are being committed by youths who don’t seem afraid of anything. Indeed, when my friend Patty found herself pinned in the aisle in Waitrose, she told me: ‘ They made no attempt to hide themselves. They had caps on but no masks or helmets. They must have been about 13 or 14. The only way I can describe their faces was gleefully maleficent. Were they there to rob? I don’t think so. Just to scare people.’
Now 72, Patty is a former opera singer who has lived in London for 43 years. But it isn’t a place she recognises any more. ‘ It’s no longer possible to go out without a care in the world. I’m always looking around thinking something might be up.’ Now when another friend, Gabriella Slattery, does the school run on Highgate High Street to pick up her eightyear-old daughter, she hides her phone in her underwear and her car keys in her shoe.
Too afraid to go to shops, she now plans to do all her Christmas shopping online. Two of her neighbours on the gated estate where she lives near Hampstead Heath were recently attacked, one pushed over at a bus stop.
Gabriella, 34, told me: ‘Everywhere I go there are either sirens wailing, police helicopters hovering or some incident has just
happened and someone’s crying in the street. I’ve seen moped thieves ride past me slowing down to see if I have something they can grab. I now just open my coat and say: “Nothing here” to show there’s nothing to steal. They ride on, looking for the next person.’
My sister Kara, head of digital for a major record label, tells of the laser-like precision used to snatch her phone. ‘It happens so quickly you don’t have time to react.
‘One minute I was carrying it in my hand, then I wasn’t. Nothing was said. It’s snatch, move, done. I told the police but with no evidence, I got a letter a few days later saying: “Case closed”.’ But as perfunctory as the crimes are, there are long-lasting effects quite apart from fear and paranoia.
As Kara points out, our phones are more than gadgets. They are mini- computers containing the blueprints of our lives. ‘It’s not just the inconvenience, it’s the fact that your entire life is stored on that device and suddenly it’s in the hands of someone else.’
So why has this crime wave suddenly reached such a critical mass? It seems that we are in the middle of a perfect storm.
We walk around oblivious to what’s going on around us with gadgets worth up to £700 glued to our ears, giving criminals highvalue, easy-to-snatch targets.
As the number of mopeds soars — thanks to the rising number of fast-food delivery services and ordinary Londoners using them to skirt around traffic — criminals have been furnished with the perfect getaway vehicle.
Not only are they easy to hotwire and steal, but police are struggling to get a handle on the situation for another reason.
A serving police officer told LBC radio recently: ‘Moped crime has gone up because we can’t pursue them. They know that we’re not allowed to touch them if they don’t wear a helmet.’
Such is the concern that the Home Office is understood to be reviewing the law after officials warned that police fear being taken to court for high- speed chases because they can be prosecuted for careless driving.
Supt Mark Payne, head of Operation Venice fighting moped crime, told the Mail: ‘Eighty per cent of all items stolen are phones and most of those are iPhones.
‘ The ideal situation for the moped thieves to snatch the phone out of your hand is while you’re using it and it’s open.
‘Then they can take it around the corner and re-programme it. If they can do that, they can get £200 for each phone they steal. They can wipe the phone and resell it through people they know or second-hand shops.’
If it’s not open, then the phone can be broken up now that there is a lucrative market for iPhone parts, adds Supt Payne.
When I ask him why these criminals — who he tells me are mainly aged between 13 and 19 — do it, he says the reason is simple. ‘The money and the buzz,’ he replied. They are also eager to show off their skills.
‘Some earn over £1,000-an-hour, but there’s also the thrill- seeking. They practise by getting friends to hold up phones and riding past to snatch them out of their hands. One of them told us he could tell what phone you’ve got in your pocket from 20 metres away. And he was right.’
Stuart Kirby, Professor of Policing and Criminal Investigation at the University of Central Lancashire, says moped thefts and robberies are a modern take on the oldest crime of all.
Where once thieves snatched handbags and wallets, now the currency is smartphones.
prof Kirby says: ‘ The ages of 15 to 17 is the highest-offending group and most young men grow out of it when they have more to lose. In the meantime, it’s a race between the youths committing the crime and law enforcement trying to catch up.’
Supt Payne believes the police have now got the technical weaponry to trap them. Although they may not be as visible and reassuring as bobbies on the beat, police now have a fleet of nimbler motorbikes to pursue offenders up alleyways and narrow streets.
Also in their tool kit are aerosols which spray an invisible dye, which marks the clothing and skin for weeks with a unique synthetic DNA code, irrefutably linking suspects to crimes.
Drones have been to used to track mopeds on criminals. As a result, at least 20 of the 50 or so hard-core criminals committing these crimes in my borough are either on remand or have been sentenced. Supt Payne says: ‘We’ve turned a corner. We understand the offending really well and have tactics in place.’
It’s a reassuring message and