Is London Really Lawless? If so, What's a Londoner to Do?

After having my mobile snatched out of my hands this week, I've been on a sobering dive into the state of law and order in 2024. Here's everything I've learnt...

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Earlier this week, while surveying my options on Citymapper on the corner of Berkeley Square, I had my phone snatched out of my hands. I was deep in the pavement, a good three or four metres from the road; it mattered not. Two balaclava’d lads on electric bikes mounted the curb, swerved towards me and simply plucked my device from my tapping digits before I could even register what had happened. Bystanders very kindly came to comfort me and while I called the police, the twosome looped back around the roundabout, and we watched in shock as they slalomed down the other side of the road relieving three more innocents of their keys into modern life. All in all, they nicked nine mobiles within about four minutes. 

I don’t wear my watch anymore. It’s not a Rolex, but it is shiny. In Chiswick, long a leafy and relatively safe (edging on banal) enclave, we’re now used to ringing a bell to get into boutiques. Doors are locked up the High Road for one reason and one reason only: persistent and unpoliced criminality. My gf was in the Co-Op just around the corner from me last week and had to shield her six-year-old as armed thieves swept the booze. The shopkeeper said it had happened a couple of days before and they couldn’t get the police to come out either time. When I mentioned the phone plucking to a table at a breakfast, two other women said it had happened to them in the past six months. I bumped into a friend at the tube, the same to him in London Bridge before Christmas. After sending email apologies to everyone I had stood up, several of them came back sharing their almost identical story.

This all puts me in an awkward predicament. I’m a liberal, with plenty of sympathy for those forced into desperate measures by the financial Armageddon. I’m also an acrobatic apologist for London in general. I desperately want to offer some kind of counter argument or statistic to put things in perspective and prove that BrITaiN iSN’t bRoKEn. I definitely don’t want to add any fuel to the Daily Mail fire about this country going to the dogs. But gawd, it’s scary out there.