Snatching city’s main gateway crime: Data
Unemployed, illiterate, school drop-outs, arrested for the first time – these are common threads that connect almost every person arrested for snatching in Delhi since 2018, highlighting how one of the most serious concerns on the streets of the national capital is also its biggest gateway crime.
An HT analysis of the profile of snatchers arrested in Delhi between 2018 and 2020 shows that more than 90% of those arrested were caught for the first time, and did not have any criminal record until then. Police registered them as “first-time offenders”.
Of the 6,496 people arrested in 2020, at least 5,977 (92.98%) were first-time offenders. In 2019, of the 5,243 arrested, this number was 4,806 (91.66%), and in 2018, 5,167 out of the 5,346
people (96.66%) arrested for snatching had no past record.
Snatching has come sharply under the spotlight after a woman was last week stabbed to death in north Delhi’s Adarsh Nagar even as she held her twoyear-old daughter in her arms
while trying to defend herself against snatchers. The two men arrested for the crime — Fardeen,19, and Aqibul, 22 — were unemployed, school drop-outs, and like the majority of Delhi’s snatchers, had never been
arrested before.
“This is what makes snatching so difficult to control. Any person on the road could be a snatcher in Delhi — he need not be a hardcore criminal. Numerous cases of first-timers indulging in this crime shows how this is the first offence that one commits before entering the world of crime,” said a senior police officer who asked not to be named.
It was a view that several other present and former cops agreed with.
Citing an example of how several young men who turn to crime because of trying circumstances start by becoming snatchers, the officer cited above said at least 100 people arrested last year said that they had turned to snatching after losing their jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic. “The situation is that a person loses his job and finds snatching as the second-best option to make a living. In October, we arrested a man named Mohsin, who worked in a shoe store but lost his job during the lockdown. He then got in touch with his two friends and tried to snatch a man’s phone outside Red Fort. The examples are too many. There are no records of such persons,” a second officer said. Explaining the difficulties in keeping track of such people, a third senior officer said: “It is easier to keep tabs on hardcore criminals and their gangs. Their activities and areas of operation are known; we can place informers. But many young men who are snatchers manage to slip through the net because they don’t have a record. It takes a concerted effort to bring down snatching cases.”
Though snatching cases in Delhi rose in 2020 as compared to 2019 — 7965 as compared to 6266 — the third officer said that distress calls to the Police Control Room number, 112, was a better indicator of mapping the crime. The calls are a part of the record and cannot be removed from the log. According to police’s crime data, in 2020 there were 24,746 snatching calls, compared to 56,937 in 2019. However, the calls do not mean number of incidents, as the same victim could have made multiple calls; and victims sometimes refer to “theft” as “snatching”. The difference between the two, in police parlance, is that there is use of force in snatching.
Further analysis of police data shows that of the snatchers arrested in 2020, almost 43.71% (2,840) were illiterate or school drop-outs (did not clear Class 5). In fact, only 10 of the arrested had graduate degrees.
The data also showed that a cell phone was the most common item snatched — in at least 71% (5,655) of the cases — followed by gold jewellery such as necklace and bracelet in at least 15% cases (1,195) and a handbag or cash in at least 8% of the cases (638).