The attack was swift, opportunistic and utterly terrifying. Noralyn Pitts recalls the sudden shock of it; her sense of a safe space violated.
It was a spring morning five weeks ago, shortly after school drop-off. Mother-of-two Noralyn, 42, a company director, had parked in a leafy road in Hampstead, North London; a wide, affluent thoroughfare flanked by sprawling Victorian villas where flats sell for around £2 million.
She had delivered her children, aged seven and ten, to their smart independent prep schools and planned a shopping trip.
Michael McIntyre, 42, had his £15,000 Rolex torn from his wrist by the gang
Mindful of a spate of street muggings that had hit the area, she was playing safe — or so she believed — by sitting in her car, paying for her parking on her mobile.
As she dialled, a moped drew up alongside her Lexus, two helmeted men jumped off it and one started to smash her passenger-side window with a rock.
It was an attack of such rapid and alarming ferocity that she registered the two young men only in a blur of panic.
‘I was terrified,’ she says. ‘One man reached into my car through the broken window, shouting for my bag, scrabbling round trying to find it on the seat. But he realised it wasn’t there, so he started yelling at me.
‘I was hysterical; covered in shards of broken glass. I jumped out of the car screaming and ran down the street for help. The moped sped off.
‘Luckily a lovely man cleaning the road saw the whole scene and called the police and ambulance. Thankfully I wasn’t physically hurt and my bag wasn’t stolen, but I was shaken and traumatised.
‘Most importantly my children were safe, but it sickens me to think these thugs are circling round the area where they go to school, looking for vulnerable, affluent victims.
Mother-of-two Noralyn, 42 (pictured), had parked in a leafy road in Hampstead, North London when she was attacked
‘I feel angry: angry that the criminals are getting more brazen and violent. You think you are safe inside your car; you’re not any more.
‘And I’m angry there’s no longer a police presence in our area. Hampstead is a prime target for these criminals. The thugs are getting more brazen as they know they can get away with it. It’s frustrating and sad to learn that it now seems to be up to us to defend ourselves and come up with ways to deter these villains.’
Police say they have scoured CCTV footage of the area where the robbers struck. They have found nothing. No arrests have been made. ‘Our inquiries continue,’ they say.
Moped crime has become an epidemic. This week, Scotland Yard revealed there have been 22,025 motorcycle muggings in the past 12 months (up 50 per cent on the year before), with armed thieves striking more than 60 times a day. Violent crime is up in 42 out of 43 police areas around the UK, and 1.3 million offences of violence against the person were logged last year — the highest since records began 15 years ago.
In the past week alone in North London, an Australian TV presenter in Islington had a £15,000 camera ripped from the hands of her film crew by thugs; and a woman was left fighting for her life after her mobile phone was snatched by a moped gang in Edgware. Then, moped muggers jumped onto the bonnet of car in nearby Finchley, knifing the driver and stealing a designer watch. Meanwhile, machete-wielding thugs broke into the home of a dentist in Cheshire, stealing £200,000 worth of valuables.
Shocking images of the robbery have been released by the police. One of suspects can be seen jumping onto to bonnet
Criminal gangs are now going for middle-class parents on the school run
And, of course, there was the attack on millionaire comedian Michael McIntyre.
Moped thugs threatened him and his terrified young son Oscar, ten, with a knife after smashing a window of his £120,000 Range Rover around 15 times with a hammer.
The star, 42, had his £15,000 Rolex torn from his wrist by the gang who struck as he drove home after picking up Oscar from his school in North London.
He may have been followed from his £5.7million Hampstead mansion and targeted for his exclusive timepiece.
But his case shines a light on the new modus operandi of these criminal gangs: they are now going for middle-class parents on the school run.
Why? They have calculated that parents with children on board, who are also stuck in after-school traffic, are easy pickings — not least because they are unlikely to jeopardise their children’s safety by defending themselves.
And the thugs feel invincible thanks to police failing to get to grips with the issue.
Let’s not forget that just 13 per cent of violent offences were solved last year. This was compared with 23 per cent in 2014. Ed Davey, the Lib Dem home affairs spokesman, summed it up this week: ‘For some areas, it’s fast becoming like the Wild West with criminals no longer afraid of getting caught.’
Nowhere is this more apparent than Hampstead — the area in which Noralyn Pitts and Michael McIntyre were attacked. I have watched crime rise alarmingly in recent years, first as crime reporter on local newspaper, The Hampstead and Highgate Express, then as its editor.
There are rich pickings in this enclave of North London, populated by the wealthy, the famous and the metropolitan elite. It has more millionaires than any other area of the UK. And right now, it has more moped crime than anywhere else in the country, too.
Out of the staggering 22,000 moped crimes in the past 12 months, 40 per cent of these offences happened on my patch, the boroughs of Camden and neighbouring Islington.
Pictures show stunned comic Michael McIntyre speaking with police moments after he was robbed by a moped gang
The comedian became another victim of London’s plague of moped crimes when he was attacked in north London
The criminals are cynical, ruthless and opportunistic. They are also becoming increasingly violent.
Last November, two men on a moped used hammers to smash through the front window of a bakery on Highgate High Street at around 2.45pm — when it was full of mums on the school run.
One mother, who was having coffee before picking up her children from a nearby private school, told me: ‘They were wearing helmets and started smashing the window with hammers. It sounded like gunfire.
‘I ran to the bathroom with five other people, one of whom had an 18-month-old baby. It was nasty, brutal and done with complete disregard for people.
‘There could easily have been more children in there. They could have easily hurt someone.’
The two men snatched a laptop before escaping on their bikes. A youth and man aged 21 were later charged in relation to the offence. Meanwhile, moped-riding burglars were last month responsible for an attempted raid on a house in an affluent Highgate road. May Chiao, editor of a science magazine, lives with her husband and their two daughters, aged six and nine, in an end-of-terrace property.
The robbers used hammers to destroy the driver’s window and demanded his silver watch, worth around £15,000
May, 46, recalls how the passenger on a moped began banging on her front door, then — when she failed to answer it — slamming his body violently against it as she bathed her six-year-old upstairs.
‘It was 6.45pm. My older daughter was downstairs doing her homework. She froze and started shaking. I heard this crashing sound. I started running downstairs. I was calling out: ‘What’s going on?’ And my daughter shouted back: ‘I don’t know.’
‘I was terrified. I was running around from one room to the other thinking I should call my husband. The moped rider had the bike facing the road, ready for the getaway. Both men wore balaclavas and helmets.
‘There were three loud bangs, then it went quiet. I ran to the bay window and saw the man coming back with a screw driver.’
May held her body against the door and set off the house alarm as the would-be burglar tried to dismantle the lock. The alarm system alerted the police.
Mr McIntyre wears his valuable Rolex most of the time (circled) but was seen without it on his wrist in the aftermath of the terrifying moped attack
‘It all happened so quickly,’ says May. ‘I could see the guy with the screwdriver through the front door and he must have seen me standing there.’
The police arrived quickly enough — in five to ten minutes, says May — but the men had long since fled empty-handed.
‘We worry we’ll be attacked again,’ she says. ‘I think it’s very important that people are aware of this problem. We have locks and we have an alarm.
‘We never used to use our third lock, but we do now. When we had the alarm installed I thought it was ridiculous to have a panic button, but I’m so glad we did.’ How have we reached a stage where we must barricade ourselves in our homes with panic buttons and alarms and keep up vigilance?
The blame, in my view, lies not with individual policemen but with the wider police culture where catching criminals is hindered by red tape and health and safety fears.
Cuts to police forces across the country — there are 21,000 fewer police today than there were in 2010 — have contributed.
Three years ago, when I first noticed the new crimewave, I interviewed police Chief Superintendent Richard Tucker before he left Camden for a new post, and he admitted his frustration.
‘There are protocols we have to follow,’ he said. ‘We cannot be chasing these bikes everywhere through the streets. It’s not safe to do so. If a lad comes off and the police are chasing, there will be an investigation and officers will be held to account.
‘I would not want, for the sake of a mobile phone, that a young lad would die, or a member of the public or a young police officer who is chasing a moped are maimed or killed,’ he said.
Police are loath, too, to release intelligence about where the moped gangs come from. Some operate as part of an organised network; others are more ad hoc and informal. The vehicles they use are invariably stolen; sometimes from delivery drivers, at other times from commuters.
Many of those convicted of such crimes come from nearby areas of North London, although the percentage of offenders being caught is shockingly low.
In Camden, Met statistics show that between April 2017 and April 2018, out of 8,264 reported offences of theft from the person, only 61 of these resulted in charges — around 0.7 per cent. None of London’s wealthy boroughs is safe: robberies have taken place in Kensington & Chelsea, Holborn and the West End, where this week a knife-wielding moped rider was wrestled to the ground by shoppers as he tried to ram-raid a luxury jewellers.
The fear is that moped gangs will now go on to target the prosperous shires. The police, of course, assure us that they are working hard to keep the public safe.
‘Every borough is mobilised to tackle offenders using local knowledge to tailor the policing required for their area, which may include Automatic Number Plate Reader deployments, conducting proactive investigations and operations which focus on high-volume offenders, and DNA capture. We are also using intelligence and CCTV to identify linked offences,’ says a Met police spokesman.
New weapons to fight back include slimline police scrambler motorcycles and a system that deploys a bed of hollow spikes that are activated remotely to deflate the tyres of motorbikes. Last month, the Home Office gave police drivers more legal protection in high-speed chases.
I would also suggest, as a matter of utmost urgency, that regular stop-and-searches of moped riders are carried out, and that pillion riding — involved in nearly every offence — should be banned.
In the meantime, like victim Noralyn Pitts, I am angry. Angry, that the area I grew up in and love, a neighbourhood that used to be such a peaceful, secure place to bring up children, is now being destroyed by these thugs.
The police and the Government need to regain control of our neighbourhoods and protect the families who value them most — before there are more serious injuries or even deaths.