Why don’t my local police work nights?

Every few weeks, I leave my front door to find a car missing its side window and a pile of glass on the pavement. One morning there were four windowless cars, all in a row; someone had already been out with duct tape and some bin bags in an attempt to keep the rain from their back seats. The debris from these thefts is just another feature of our London street, like the confetti from Chelsea’s Registry Office which flutters all the way down the King’s Road. But last Wednesday, at 8.15 p.m. to be exact, I witnessed my first attempted smash and grab. 

The two cyclists hadn’t seen me, fag in hand, watching them from my balcony when they pulled up outside. They looked professional, dressed all in black and wearing motocross-style helmets with balaclavas underneath, kitted out in the closest you can get to SWAT gear for less than a hundred quid on Amazon. Each had a rucksack and each a high-powered LED light mounted on his handlebars. One made his way to the end of a row of parked cars to stand guard while the other started at the top of the line, using a pocket torch to look for loot in the front two seats, then the back. After the third car, my anger burst out. ‘Oi! YOU. YOU!!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? EFF OFF! EFF OFF!!!’

The main thief looked up, shining his torch in my eyes. He paused for a second and then, with a defiant kick, pushed his bike onto the next parked car. I continued shouting obscenities into the street and he continued along the line. A few pedestrians on the other side of the road stopped to watch. Eventually, his look-out had enough, jolting off into the dark and, realising the game was up, the main thief reluctantly pedalled after him. 

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to intervene. I called London’s non-emergency crime hotline at Christmas after another evening of shattered windows. It took about 25 minutes to get through to an operator. She sounded bored but gave me the traditional crime reference number and sighed that, yes, a squad car might stop by if they had the time. I didn’t see them if they did. 

Most popular

Sam Leith

The ‘goodies and baddies’ era of world politics is over

I also emailed my local councillor, the head of Kensington and Chelsea, after the night of the four cars. I had to chase, but was eventually told that her office was ‘acknowledging receipt’ of my email and was passing me on to the ‘community safety team’. A very polite Met officer got in touch a few days later to explain that I do indeed live in a hotspot for car break-ins. They are, he wrote, ‘unfortunately happening quite often… I will be honest we do not work the nights often, but if we do we are focusing on robberies and theft from motor vehicle.’ Hmm. Does the Met really think thieves work a standard 9-to-5 shift? 

I explained in my email that I had rung the police before but not much had happened. The community safety officer tried his best to reassure me: ‘If you called and it was happening there and then, they should have sent units to come by, but I would not be surprised if there were none available.’ I’m not surprised either but I do feel a little depressed about the whole thing. What’s even more irksome is that the street is always crawling with parking officers who lurk behind corners to catch drivers nipping into the coffee shop at the end of the road. They’re there every day without fail. How galling that minor parking infractions are policed more diligently than actual crimes. 

On another evening, I heard a car alarm blaring and decided to go down into the street to see what all the racket was about. There was an agitated woman standing in a pile of glass next to her driver’s seat door. ‘Did you see what happened,’ she asked, keeping her worried eyes on me even after I said no and turned back to my building. 

I understand her suspiciousness. I don’t have a car, but we were burgled when I was a teenager and I remember home never felt quite the same afterwards. I’d look at dog walkers differently as they strolled past the garden wall and found that I was more attuned to the pitch of engines going by. Did that sound like a van? Was the driver slowing to take a peek at the house? I can’t hear an oncoming car, so why has he stopped? Perhaps my London neighbour has spotted me since and wondered whether I was the perpetrator all along. 

It sounds so inconsequential – ‘ugh, my car was broken into last night’ – but it’s the kind of thing that can play on your mind. How violating to have your folded-up stroller messed with, to have your dry cleaning frisked and your kid’s iPad picked from the backseat pocket. The two-hour drive to grandma’s will be a nightmare now. And what about the selfies you’ve taken together? Are they going to get wiped or worse, is some horrible stranger going to flick through photos of your children sitting in the kitchen? 

I used to work in London’s courts and I know how leniently low-level criminals are dealt with. I remember feeling shocked after one defendant, with over 40 convictions for burglary, was allowed to walk out of Westminster Magistrates after what must have felt like a routine visit. The car thieves appeared to be carrying out a pretty routine operation too, but what struck me most was the one who looked me in the eye and tried to continue his crime. It suggests that the term ‘opportunist thief’ isn’t quite right. An opportunist would have scarpered immediately. But it seemed like this guy wanted to make a point: despite my protests, he would do what he wanted. It speaks of something we all know but isn’t really mentioned in criminal justice circles: that there’s something vindictive about law breaking. This isn’t an exercise in pure economics but is, on some level, revenge. Revenge against those who have more than you, those with a BMW and an iPad just for their kids.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I haven’t bothered reporting the latest aborted break-in. What’s the point of waiting on the phone for half an hour to request a police car that probably won’t turn up? Or writing to a councillor who’s only going to fob me off to a ‘community safety team’ that tells me they don’t work nights anyway? The car thieves are long gone – and with them any sense that those in charge care about petty crime.