This honestly doesn't seem like a problem with organisational silos. The level of efficiency the author is suggesting is completely unnecessary. If the police had done some very basic police work, followed up the unauthorized transactions at each location for CCTV they would have gotten a very clear idea of who this person was. In fact hell, find out which phones pinged the phone tower near each of the locations at each of the relevant times and you almost certainly have exactly one suspect who'll match the CCTV and would be banged to rights.

With small crimes it's not that they can't be solved, it's that the UK has decided it would rather have some petty crime than to pay the taxes necessary to catch petty criminals (assuming that catching the criminal would even solve the crime problem). The current state of policing in the UK is that small thefts won't be investigated - so it doesn't matter how easy they are to solve.

As others have posted, this is not in any way an issue with organisational silos.

The Met simply have limited funding and more important matters to investigate. They are essentially attempting to politely explain that to you.

One of the morals of the story is to never leave your wallet out of sight or out of feel when you’re in public spaces. Leaving your wallet in a back-pack and the back-pack in a corner of a restaurant/pub is asking for big trouble. In the very few cases when I have to leave my wallet unattended (like in a backpack at the side of a basketball court) I previously leave my bank cards and ID at home, I only bring some cash with me.

London is really bad for bag snatching. Never, ever leave your wallet, keys, phone or passport in your bag. Even when you’re holding the bag.

Don’t think for a moment that the theives aren’t watching you. Don’t think that you can just put your bag down while you look through a rack of clothes or leave it at your table while you order another drink from the bar. The theives are brazen, and as the article points out the millions of cameras that will watch it happen are not there to protect you.

This reminds me of a card skimmer I found on an ATM about 12 years ago (unfortunately, after I had used it to withdraw cash). I basically lucked into finding the camera hole and managed to rip the fake cover + video camera + transmitter from the frame of the ATM. With that in hand (unfortunately I dis not think to also take out the card reader itself), I called the police. While I was on the phone with them, a foreign couple tried to use the ATM. I told them not to, they pretended not to understand, I went back to my phone call with the police. When I turned around, the card reader was gone: that nice couple was the thieves, they were somewhere near (to catch the video footage of people entering their PIN) and swooped in to retrieve the card reader and the data stored in it.

The police squad that came around was fairly decent, but they didn’t really seem to be on the lookout for this type of crime; one of the cops confessed that he’d used the same ATM the night before and was genuinely impressed that I’d spotted it. Spending a couple of hours in the police station to give my statement (rather than going to the restaurant as initially planned) sucked, of course. I was shocked at how bad I was at describing the thieves, even though I’d seen them and talked to them.

Following up with the bank was similarly frustrating; the bank director told me he personally checked the ATM at opening and closing time, meaning the thieves installed and removed the card reader every night. I never found out if the other victims were made aware of the fact that their card details were stolen.

So, yes, thieves are brazen and smart; police are nice (sometimes) but helpless or just don’t care about these types of crime; and even though I did all I could to mitigate the situation, I still felt a bit shitty and helpless about the whole experience.

This was a smart but unsavvy approach to solving the problem. A better one would have been to appeal to people's better natures.

I think it can generally be said that bureaucracies mostly exist to serve other bureaucracies, mere mortals are illegible drains on their resources, to put it candidly, if they helped every sad sack with a sad story that showed up at their doorstep, pretty soon that's going to be all they're doing.

So instead you have to persuade, cajole people into helping you out. You find the one guy with both the spare time and the wherewithal to work the system. Spin a detective story out of it, make it interesting for them. Never lose sight of the fact that they're doing you a favor and send a nice thank-you card after its sorted.

Sure, political forces have driven wedges between institutions that should be public-facing and the public they should be serving. But that doesn't mean that good people don't still work there. You just have to get them interested. Anyone you speak to can be cajoled into doing the right thing. But they won't unless you help them see the light.

This should be required reading for all the Americans that think the UK has 50 CCTV cameras per person or whatever that bullshit statistic was.

Yes we have a lot, but they're mostly privately owned and nobody will look at them for anything less than GBH or murder.

Nicely written article and I am sorry for what happened. Similar thing happened to a friend of mine some years ago and since then I don’t dare take my bag out during evenings.

Re The Met - it’s a sad state of affairs with policing in the UK. It comes down to the following: police only ‘care’ to investigate or deal with 3 types of criminals: 1. Terrorists 2. Paedophiles 3. Speeding motorists

If you wish to do any other criminality in the UK then you have pretty much free reign to carry out things with impunity. Government are even talking about abolishing jail sentences for ‘minor’ crimes (not to improve rehabilitation but to save money).

I am emigrating. I can see where things are heading and it’s not good for this country.

Anyone who has lived for any time in London knows that bag disappears. A lot. A coworker lost a week of work when his bag was snatched during the Friday pub drinks.

Mind your belongings. Police will not do anything about it.

The only thing this thief exploited is the idiocy of the victim, who carried around a backpack full of expensive items, his passport (leave it at home or in the hotel), and his wallet (put it in your pocket), and then left it piled in the corner. Of a bar.

We should all be glad that the police don't waste their time on petty crime like this. This guy didn't deserve this, but the rest of us shouldn't have to pay for his naivety.

This fellow should follow the police's lead: it's petty crime that is unlikely to get resolved without an uneconomic expenditure of limited time and resources. What is he reasonably hoping to achieve?

Understandably he seems to be personally outraged by his experience, but if he put his emotions aside he'd put it down to experience, make an insurance claim, get his documents and cards reissued and move on.

TLDR : thieves often get away with crime because resources are limited, and smarter thieves play into it.

However I hardly think that concerntrating power is a solution nor that this is really a problem that needs to be solved by finding he thieves.

I’d be curious to know by how much incidents of petty crime are reduced for every 1% increase in the wealth of the poorest 5%.

Meanwhile, I think the police are doing the right thing by focusing on organised and serious crime, and society would be doing the right thing if it focused on the causes of crime rather than on expanding the police force.