As anyone interested in trends would know, there’s been a surge in a specific type of city-center crime recently, one which involves a scrote whizzing past his victim, snatching their phone from their hand en passant. This has made London, amongst others, a place where one should not walk the streets while catching up with an old friend on the phone, or even just calling home to make sure that the kids have not set fire to the house while one has been busy at the gym.
I’ve never understood this connectivity obsession anyway, especially as one shouldn’t talk on the phone in the street (for any reason) because believe it or not, passers-by are not really interested in your choice of wine for tonight’s dinner party.
But back to the phone robbers. Britishland is applying the boot with a heavy hand in response to this epidemic:
E-scooters and e-bikes driven by brazen phone snatchers are to be destroyed by police within hours of being seized amid a crackdown on London’s mobile theft epidemic.
Previously officers had to warn offenders before taking away and crushing a bike, scooter or any other vehicle driven in an anti-social manner or if it was used to facilitate a theft.
But now, new powers will mean police won’t have to wait two weeks before throwing them away and will be able to do so in a two-day time frame.
Now far be it for me to rail against the crushing of these electric pestilences, which have been involved in so many pedestrian collisions because their riders are reckless assholes, not to mention the above assholes of the larcenous kind.
But it seems to me that the wrong part of this equation is being punished. I’m no expert on the topic, but I have to feel that crushing a thief’s e-bike is rather pointless, in that said thieves having been thus dispossessed will simply steal a fresh bike with which to continue their little reindeer games.
Surely, for all sorts of reasons, it should be the thieves getting fed into the crusher’s jaws rather than their conveyances? Much more likely to slow this modern kind of theft, I think.
But no doubt someone’s going to have a problem with this, as would my followup suggestion that said crushing of scrotes be made a PPV TV event.