Personal robbery and street crime: What to do by Professor Gloria Laycock

Professor Gloria Laycock, Director of the UCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, demystifies some of the myths surrounding personal robbery and mugging. While many believe that an increase in such crimes must relate to ‘serious street robbers marauding the streets at night', the figures actually suggest that it's more often young people stealing mobile phones from each other. By identifying the specific forms of personal robbery, Professor Laycock thinks that solutions will be much easier to find. [January 2010]

It is never pleasant being the victim of crime and offences in which you may come face to face with the offender are particularly upsetting. Although the majority of instances of street crime do not involve such confrontation, they are no less disturbing for that. Unfortunately, such offences are also particularly difficult to detect. They are furtive, unseen, often not even noticed until you look for your purse or wallet in the next shop, or reach for your mobile phone to find it missing. It is sometimes not even possible to say when or where the offence might have happened. So, what should we do about them?

At University College London (UCL), in the Department of Security and Crime Science (which is part of the Jill Dando Institute), we teach a new approach to crime control which we call crime science. It is unambiguously about reducing crime – either by preventing it from happening in the first place or by catching offenders more reliably and quickly. In practice this means taking a much more scientific approach to dealing with crime and disorder – including robbery. We approach it as a scientist would - by being clear on the problem and then experimenting until an appropriate solution is developed – and learn in the process.

What have we learned about personal robbery and street crime?

Firstly, if we are to solve problems, we need to be clear just what they are. The problem of ‘robbery' cannot be solved under one umbrella, but the problems of bank robbery, cash in transit robbery (where security guards are robbed as they carry cash across the pavement from security van to bank), street mugging, mobile phone theft and so on, can be. They are separate, significantly different problems and as such have different solutions.

Let's look at one of these problems and the implications for prevention. What about street robbery?

In 2006, there was a significant increase in street robbery, sometimes called mugging, to the extent that the Home Office asked us at the UCL Jill Dando Institute to work with some of those London Boroughs with a particular problem and see if we could help to prevent it. We needed to be clear just what the problem was and we felt, having talked to the police and their crime analysts in one of the areas, that the rise might be centred on children stealing from each other. The analysts looked closely at their data and sure enough, as you can see from the diagram below, the vast majority of the increase in robbery in 2006 was caused by an increase of 335 victims aged 16 and under in 2006, when compared with 2005. This amounted to a rise of 84%.

This simple observation brings a very different perspective to the problem. The rise was not, as might have been assumed, caused by serious street robbers marauding the streets at night; it was young people stealing from each other in broad daylight – and in about 75% of cases mobile phones were involved. In my day, this was called bullying, and pocket money might have been taken. This does not, of course, mean that we should ignore it or take it less seriously. Indeed, there is a strong case for taking it even more seriously than if it had been a small group of committed thieves. If not tackled these youngsters might learn that they can take each others' things with impunity and go on from there to even more serious offending.

Further analysis showed that these robberies were taking place at the transport hubs mainly on weekdays after school (see diagram above). The pattern at weekends, when the children are all busy elsewhere was very different. At weekends the problem was much reduced, and occurred in town centres or leisure centres if and when robberies did happen.

Once the problem is broken down like this, it becomes much easier to see what to do about it. In these cases, police community support officers in the right place at the right time works wonders. In our problem borough, there were additional but less frequent problems of street robbery associated with the pubs and clubs in the late evening, when people the worse for drink were especially vulnerable to robbery. But clearly, the solutions to these problems were going to be very different.

A quite different problem is posed by theft of handbags in coffee bars, by ‘dips' on Oxford Street or by purses being stolen from shopping trolleys in supermarkets. Furthermore, the solutions are also different. The bottom line is that we need to pay much more attention to preventing these offences in the first place and there is lots of evidence to suggest that this can be done very effectively. Unfortunately even with the best police force in the world (and ours is quite good) the chances of catching many of these opportunistic offenders is not high.

Professor Laycock's tips on preventing personal robbery:

Confrontational robbery where perpetrators demand that victims had over their personal belongings are really rare, so avoiding becoming a victim often comes down to common sense:

• Don't leave your bag/purse in the shopping trolley at the supermarket.
• Don't put your stuff on the floor of the coffee bar.
• Don't leave your purse/wallet on view hanging out of your back pocket or in a backpack.
• Don't let your kids take their new mobile/iPod/games player to school.
• Don't get drunk and wander around alone at night.

Author note

Professor Gloria Laycock worked for the Home Office for more than thirty years, spending the majority of her time working on researching and developing policing and crime prevention. As well as establishing and heading up the Home Office Police Research Group, she has acted as a consultant on policing and crime prevention across the world. She is also the author of several publications about crime prevention.

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