‘Mind the Grab’ is victim-blaming at its worst

It has been a very long time since London’s Oxford Street struck the neutral observer as having the kind of prosperity and allure that one would expect of the nation’s premier commercial thoroughfare.

Still, even by the standards of the vape shops and ‘American Candy’ stores that long ago replaced Topshop, HMV and the Virgin Megastore as the street’s vital organs, the latest eye-catching innovation is a dismal symptom of London’s defeatism and decline.

Launched this week by electronics retailer Currys, the ‘Mind the Grab’ initiative puts a lurid purple stripe along the pavement outside its store, urging pedestrians to step back from the kerb and conceal their phones from the motorised scavengers that now patrol these shores, like undocumented gannets.

The scheme is, for the time being, local to the Oxford Street store, and will also involve training staff to assist victims by contacting family, cancelling cards and even helping them get home safely. That much, at least, is noble.

Strikingly, it is backed by Westminster Council, the Metropolitan Police and Crimestoppers. People who actually have the power to do something about the thieves. It seems that telling us to mind the grab is about as much as London mayor Sadiq Khan has to offer Londoners and bewildered tourists at risk of having their phones pinched. And that is not good enough.

As cloying advice to avoid crime goes, the slogan ‘mind the grab’ might be the most jarring I’ve heard since the anti-sexual-assault song, ‘Stop, don’t touch me there, this is my no no square’.

Of course, mind the grab is meant to echo the iconic ‘mind the gap’ warnings on the London Underground. Emerging when Tube trains pull into stations with curved platforms, the gap is of course a quirk of Victorian-era engineering, a historical artefact. The ‘grab’ however is not a historical curio – it is a social, criminal phenomenon that should be tackled. Yet here is a business, backed by the local authorities, cheerfully warning pedestrians about theft, as if the scooter-mounted scum responsible for it were an inescapable but charming fact of London life, like mischievous temple monkeys in Bali. This is a pretty dismal reflection of our capital’s political leadership.

Beneath the breezy branding of ‘mind the grab’ lies a profoundly disgusting reality: ordinary people are now expected to police their own safety on perhaps our most famous shopping street. All because the authorities have failed to curb the crimewave.

The statistics paint a grim picture. Last year alone, a phone was stolen every 15 minutes in Westminster – equating to 94 devices per day and over 34,000 annually. The vast majority of these are, as we all know, snatched by thieves on battery-assisted scooters and bikes. As we also all know, even when reported to the police, virtually none of these crimes is pursued, any more than burglaries are or indeed any sort of crime other than driving at 80mph on an otherwise empty motorway.

But for me, it’s not simply that the campaign is an indictment of the systemic failure to catch and deter criminals. It’s not even so much the ‘victim blaming’ suggestion that we must simply adapt to the reality of moped-riding thieves. After all, alerting people to the dangers posed by pick-pockets has been a reasonably uncontroversial project on the London Underground and elsewhere for many years.

No, what strikes me as so disheartening is the primary-school level at which the messaging is delivered. Instead of a serious, wall-mounted brass and enamel plaque, say, announcing in stern typeface that balaclava’d desperados will grab your valuables given half a chance, we have this school-playground aesthetic instead – as if the authorities are warning toddlers to stay well away from the edge of a perilous three-foot-deep boating lake.

There are other ways to approach the problem. If Oxford Street were to be patrolled by smartly dressed police officers, in dark serge navy jackets and proper helmets, rather than chunky, squat Community Support munchkins with all the intimidating presence of a space hopper, then I think we’d see an uptick in both the safety and the general prosperity of the neighbourhood.

If local businesses, not just Currys, wanted to finance that type of police presence, I’d be enormously grateful. The officers could even be subtly branded, without looking like volunteer officials at a fun run. And if they were given the powers to not just topple e-thugs from their mounts with a well delivered truncheon blow, but also to bark at sleep-walking, screen-grazing pedestrians and suggest they holster their devices and concentrate, I would happily go along with that, too. Even though I know I’d be among the first of the somnambulists to get an earful.

Pedestrians – shoppers, tourists, commuters – shouldn’t have to live in constant vigilance, treating every kerbside as a ‘snatch zone’. We deserve streets where alertness isn’t a survival skill. But first and foremost, we deserve to be treated like adults, and to honour the expectation accordingly.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.