Moped crime: the new scourge of our cities
“Ah, the famous sights of London,” said Clare Foges in The Sun: black cabs, double decker buses – and “thugs” on mopeds spreading fear and mayhem. Earlier this month, the comedian Michael Mcintyre became the most high-profile victim to date of this new crime wave, when two men smashed the windows of his Range Rover with hammers and threatened him. Around the same time, footage emerged of moped riders pulling up alongside a car stuck in traffic on the North Circular road and jumping onto its bonnet, before terrorising its driver with a knife. In both cases, they got away with valuable watches. Elsewhere, people have been shot, stabbed, sprayed with acid and dragged along the ground. A jewellery shop in Regent Street has been raided twice this year, and two days before the Boat Race, a moped gang stopped the rush-hour traffic on Putney Bridge and attempted to cut down a BBC camera trained on the River Thames (succeeding later at Barnes Bridge). Last year, there were 23,000 recorded moped crimes in London – 63 a day on average and a 187.5% rise on the previous year.
It’s not just a London problem: police in other cities have reported a rise in “moped-enabled crime”, and knife crime generally has risen 22% in a year in England and Wales, said Hamish Mcrae in The Independent. Possible explanations include cuts in police numbers, cash flowing to drug gangs owing to cocaine’s growing popularity, and people carrying expensive phones creating rich pickings for thieves. But it’s too soon to panic about a lawless Britain: violent crime in the long term is falling, and this “wave” will retreat as police develop counter strategies.
New technology would help. London is littered with cameras (some 500,000 of them), said Harry de Quetteville in The Daily Telegraph, but police struggle to process all the data – and it tends to be after the event: on the street, they’re mainly still reliant on radios and it can take half an hour just to do a criminal record check. By contrast, in New York beat cops get data in real time – from CCTV, number plate readers, chemical sensors, even microphones that “hear” gunshots – via mobile devices. Here, cheaper strategies are being developed or considered, said The Guardian, including the use of tyre-bursting spikes and reforms to protect police from prosecution if they crash while chasing mopeds. But ultimately, successful policing requires painstaking effort, and that costs money: if the new crackdown on moped crime is to work, our forces need to be properly resourced.