Four gin-and-tonics were lined up on the bar. Two packets of salt ‘n vinegar, and one cheese and onion for the maverick. I reached into my pocket to pay for the round. I hadn’t brought my wallet — why bother, when you can tip-tap with your phone wherever you go, spending money as if it’s not real? But my phone was not there. On rushed the squirm of embarrassment, at having to ask my acquaintances to buy their own round. And, um, my dinner. Oh, and, so sorry, could you stretch to a train ticket home?

Maybe I had lost it? I am scatty, cavalier with my possessions. I borrowed a phone and got my daughter to block mine remotely. Once home, I fired up my laptop and flicked on Find-My-Phone. There it was, in its own little icon, flashing at me. Only, it was very much not waiting, lost, for me. It had zipped across London and was currently in Walthamstow. 

We report crime nowadays for the insurance company

It is a common motif in children’s literature that the soul can live in external form outside the body — Phillip Pullman’s daemons or JK Rowling’s horcruxes. Maybe it was the gin, but I felt something of that watching my phone’s icon wink at me from afar. That lovely piece of tech with all the photos of my kids, the happy smiling screensaver of us all, my notes, my diary, my downloaded podcasts, my stream of WhatsApp chats. Some Fagin-figure, in that house in Walthamstow, had chucked it carelessly in a box with all the other phones gleaned across London that night. 

I did not have high hopes when I filled in the Met’s online form to report the theft, as advised by the 101 service. A recent YouGov poll found that seventy per cent of the public think that the police will not bother investigating mobile phone and wallet thefts. Seventy-seven per cent think that the police do not bother investigating bike thefts, either. Perhaps this is why I did not bother reporting it when my bike was stolen a couple of years ago, or when my wallet was nicked. I did, however, report the stolen car. And the home burglary. (London, I love you and I hate you.)

We report crime nowadays to get a crime reference number for the insurance company. It feels like a performance. Everybody pretends to care that a crime has been committed; nobody expects a crime to be solved. I get a new phone, the thief gets my old one. One quick factory reset and onwards. Everybody is happy — except for the lingering resentment that our property can be stolen with such lack of consequence. The statistics bear this out: Home Office figures show that only 4.1 per cent of reported thefts and 6.3 per cent of burglaries ended in charges in the year ending March 2022.

On the report, I included the Find-My-Phone data. Nine hours later I received an automated police email telling me that after carefully looking into my case, “with the evidence and leads available, it is unlikely that it will be possible to identify those responsible”. Case closed.

I knocked out a tweet, poking fun at the email, and pointing out that the evidence and leads available included, you know, an actual address. I thought it might amuse my small, bookish following. 

The tweet blew up. To date it has been viewed over 500,000 times and retweeted almost 1,000. The replies all tell similar stories of police inaction and technology ignored. Some of the respondents had taken matters into their own hands, turning up on doorsteps. I am far too chicken. I did Google Map the street, from the safety of mine, and because I’m a Londoner, I checked house prices, naturally. 

Once my tweet had gone viral-ish, the case was reopened. Funny that. A detective looked again and saw another phone was stolen in a similar location and traced through Find-My-Phone to the same address. He visited the house, which was only possible because it was single-occupancy — rather than a block of flats. Find-my-Phone is accurate to 50 metres, which is useless in an area of dense occupation. This also means that gaining warrants solely on the back of Find-my-Phone is not easily done. 

The occupants gave him absolutely no reason to believe that they were habitual phone pilferers. He visited the nearby garages. No phone-Fagin there. Case closed again. I am grateful to the DS for trying, whilst uneasy it took a viral tweet to prompt action. Besides, as he explained, the thieves may be a little shameless, but they are not stupid. They play with Find-My-Phone, too, allowing it to trace for a while before turning on aeroplane mode. The house in Walthamstow may be the last known location of my phone, not the current one — and it might have registered when the thieves were parked outside. 

Property theft is to the police what bins are to the council

The Met’s own figures show that twenty-four phones a day are stolen in London. I accept that it would be a colossal waste of time for friendly Detective Sergeants to scamper after each one. 

Assistant Commissioner Louisa Rolfe says that there is a mismatch between public expectations and how the police explain what they do. She gives the example of vehicle theft. “If for example your car is stolen from your driveway, there is often very little to be gained by officers coming and looking at an empty driveway, but there is an awful lot to be gained from understanding if it is part of a pattern … At the moment the public think, you haven’t come out to me so you don’t care. We need to be better at explaining what we do.” She insists: “We do care.”

The Met police is under pressure on all sides — a crunch on resources, the fall-out from its own officers’ appalling behaviour. It cannot afford to ignore this gulf between the police and the public they serve in the unglamourous area of property crime. 

For the vast majority of us, our only contact with the police is when something we value more than they do is stolen. Detectives can trace patterns from behind their desks, waiting for a cluster of Find-My-Phone pings which are sufficient to justify a visit or a warrant. Technology advances, but humans are slow to catch up. We do want the police to come and look sympathetically at our empty driveways, just as we want to see our doctors in the flesh and our midwives pretending that this miraculous baby is the only one that has ever been born.

Property theft is to the police what bins are to the council — the most visible reminder of why we pay taxes. If the bins overflow, our council tax grates. If our mobile phones and wallets and cars and laptops are seemingly snatched with impunity, our trust in the police is irreparably damaged. You cannot get insurance cover for broken faith.