A phone is reported stolen in London every six minutes. And last Thursday night, mine became one of them. Seamlessly taken from my pocket on Charing Cross Road without me realising, before it was switched off — and pinged on Find My iPhone a couple of hours later on the A12 in Ilford.
My first response was to ask the manager of the pub next to where it happened if anything had been handed in — or if they had CCTV. He simply replied: “Nah mate, happens outside all the time. They take them and run straight to the Tube or jump on a bus. And the police do nothing. It’s gone.”
He was right. After hearing the experiences of friends and people I’d met through previous reporting on this, getting my phone stolen in London at some point felt like a statistical inevitability. I’ve witnessed phone snatchings on the Tube — and suspected I’ve had one or two close calls myself. My first thought was: “Thank goodness it wasn’t violent, that I’m unharmed and no weapons were involved.” My second was a bit of modern day Blitz spirit: “I’m not letting this ruin my night, let’s continue to the pub”.
@uyennninh and it’s beautiful here but that’s not the point
♬ original sound - Uyen Ninh
Within 48 hours of reporting it via 101, the Met closed the case with no investigation or attempt by any officer to contact me. New data reveals half of all reported phone thefts in the capital are “screened out” by police in this way. Like many Londoners, my phone is the most expensive thing I own. That it can be taken from me with no attempt to retrieve it at all is deeply troubling.
I’m aware it’s difficult to trace a phone once it’s been switched off — but other victims report telling the police exactly where it is on Find My iPhone and they still do nothing. The main use it seems of reporting a phone stolen is to get a crime number which can then be used to make an insurance claim. I didn’t have insurance — but I have now bought it for my replacement phone. But this cycle just encourages phone theft. If victims have insurance, they get a new phone anyway and there’s no pressure for the police to investigate. So thieves know the police simply won’t bother to find them and keep stealing, effectively decriminalising phone theft.
There are vast pressures on police budgets and petty theft is clearly low down the list of priorities compared to other crimes. However, it shouldn’t necessarily be. Many phones stolen on the streets of London end up shipped abroad and stripped for parts — often in the same industrial district in Shenzhen in China. It’s a smaller piece in a much bigger global crime puzzle.
But also, police have work to do in rebuilding their relationship with communities they serve — especially women and minorities. As someone who isn’t particularly trusting in the police, their refusal to even attempt to find such an important item hardly fills me with goodwill. Like assurances that police will attend every burglary, making victims of crime at least feel listened to feels like an easy win in rebuilding that trust.
It may seem like I’m just another whiny Gen Z snowflake who can’t tolerate being offline for even a second. But I truly believe this experience sums up how broken everything feels at the minute — and has felt for the past 10 or more years. Basic law and order is questioned, and public services needing to ringfence funds for the "big stuff" means day-to-day smaller problems aren’t dealt with. So they just become bigger (and more expensive) issues later down the road.
Videos from visiting TikTokers go viral for mocking our city’s endemic phone theft problem and, quite frankly, it’s embarrassing. Our blasé attitude is making London the butt of a joke and it needs to change.
