The continuing problem of mobile phone muggings in London and the emergence of e-bikes in addition to mopeds as a means for the culprits to arrive and make off at speed is inevitably causing a search for solutions.
The most obvious response — which the Met and City of London Police say they’re working hard to deliver — is to do everything possible to identify and arrest those responsible so they can be brought to justice.
Deterrence, in the form of a visible police presence in the high-risk areas where the two-wheeled robbers tend to operate most, can also help reduce the number of muggings being carried out. But as with many other crimes that the police say can’t be solved through law enforcement alone, mobile muggings also require other answers, in this case technological. The Met Commissioner and Mayor have already met representatives of some of the biggest tech companies to ask them to introduce a “kill switch” that will disable phones as soon as a mugging is reported and the same message was emphasised when the Home Office’s policing minister Chris Philp, the MP for Croydon South, also met Apple executives in a further attempt to encourage action.
Mr Philp is also understood to want phone companies to make it easier to trace stolen mobiles by having their unique IMEI number displayed on the body of the phone. That would make detection easier, but the real step forward will be if the tech firms respond to the political and police appeals and adapt their technology so that phones can be switched off permanently the moment they are stolen.
That would destroy the market for such devices and amount to the sort of technical solution that has already helped reduce offences such as car thefts and burglary, where innovation has helped if not to design out crime altogether, but certainly to reduce it.
There’s no obvious reason why the phone companies couldn’t do it to spare potential future mugging victims from an unpleasant and frightening ordeal.
