2026年9月8日 美国东部时间上午11:48 / 哥伦比亚广播公司新闻
作者：埃米特·莱昂斯
伦敦——近年来，蒙面男子骑踏板摩托车或电动自行车沿伦敦街头作案、直接从毫无防备的游客和路人手中抢走手机的画面在网络上疯传。这些犯罪分子利用了新型快速且隐蔽的交通技术，一度让警方束手无策。
这类肆无忌惮的抢劫在英国首都愈演愈烈，以至于伦敦大都会警察局（简称“伦敦警队”）专门成立了一支特别行动队——“拦截者”小组，专门打击这些两轮摩托劫匪。该行动队成立近三年后，警方数据显示案件数量呈积极的下降趋势。
2024年，也就是手机抢夺案高发期，伦敦全市共发生8万起此类案件。根据伦敦警队的官方统计数据，截至今年7月，已有3.5万部手机被抢。
警方将这一下降趋势归功于“拦截者”小组。这些专业警员接受过战术追击训练，在伦敦市中心各处巡逻，专门针对手机窃贼开展行动。
警匪对决：无人机与电动自行车登场
“拦截者”小组效仿作案目标的作案手段，将强硬的地面警务与科技手段相结合，使用精密摄像头、无人机，甚至警员自己驾驶的电动自行车，追踪并当场截停窃贼。
他们将重点放在游客众多、手机盗窃案最频发的伦敦市中心区域。
伦敦警队向哥伦比亚广播公司新闻提供的一段极具冲击力的警车行车记录仪视频，展示了“拦截者”小组使用的其中一种战术：将自己的车辆或电动自行车直接撞向疑似劫匪，将他们从车上撞下来。
“我们引入了电动自行车等新技术……我们配备了无人机，还安装了自动车牌识别摄像头。我们动用了各种层级的技术，以精准摸清这些犯罪分子的作案模式，”伦敦警队负责手机盗窃案件的高级指挥官安迪·费瑟斯通对哥伦比亚广播公司新闻表示。
他表示，当接到手机被盗的报案后，“无人机可以在数秒内抵达现场”，相当于“拥有了空中之眼”。
“随后我们的地面‘拦截者’警员就可以出动，他们能以比以往更安全的方式追击并截停罪犯——过去警员需要直视目标才能追踪，才能跟上他们的行踪，了解他们的去向，”费瑟斯通说道。
哥伦比亚广播公司新闻记者随“拦截者”小组出动，亲眼目睹警员们利用车牌识别技术锁定了两辆与疑似案件有关的踏板摩托车，随后实施了两次逮捕行动。
其中一次逮捕发生在一名驾驶踏板摩托车的少年无视警员闪灯示意停车的要求之后。警员核查后发现，这名年轻人几天前刚在伦敦拉德布罗克格罗夫地区涉嫌参与手机抢夺案。
全局视角与更彻底的解决方案
费瑟斯通指挥官告诉哥伦比亚广播公司新闻，部分手机抢夺团伙背后有犯罪网络撑腰，伦敦警方如今在追溯案件根源方面愈发高效。
“我们发现这里存在一个出口市场，”他说，并补充道，大量被盗手机最终流向北非或亚洲，尤其是中国，“那里会拆解这些手机，将其作为零件出售。”
英国警方如今正与苹果、字母表集团等美国科技巨头合作，打击手机“越狱”行为——即破解操作系统，让设备能被未经授权的新用户使用——以开发相关技术，确保被盗手机除原机主外无法被任何人使用。
“当我们消除被盗手机在二手市场的价值时，我们才能真正从根源上解决这个问题，”费瑟斯通说道。
London police use tech to tackle masked phone snatchers
2026-09-08 11:48 AM EDT / CBS News
By Emmet Lyons
London — Images of masked men riding along London’s streets on mopeds or electric bikes and snatching phones straight out of the hand of unsuspecting tourists and locals have gone viral in recent years. The criminals have essentially taken advantage of new, quick but quiet transport technology to get a leg up on police.
The brazen robberies became such a problem in the U.K. capital that London’s Metropolitan Police (the Met) developed a special task force — the Interceptors — specifically to combat the two-wheeled bandits. Nearly three years after the unit was established, police data indicate a positive downward trend.
During 2024, at the height of the phone snatching trend, there were 80,000 such offenses across London. As of July this year, 35,000 phones had been snatched, according to official statistics from the Met.
Police officials attribute that downward trend to the Interceptors. The specialist officers are trained in tactical pursuit and they operate across central London, specifically targeting phone thieves.
Cops and robbers, and drones and e-bikes
Taking a cue from their targets, the Interceptors use a combination of assertive on-the-ground policing and technology, including sophisticated cameras, drones and even officers on their own e-bikes, to track down and stop the thieves in their tracks.
They have focused on the central parts of London where tourists are ever-present, and where phone theft has been most frequent.
A phone user walks past a message on a sidewalk on Oxford Street in central London warning people of phone snatching crime, as part of a “Mind the Grab” initiative by local government, police and a technology retailer, Aug. 7, 2025, in London, England. Richard Baker/In Pictures/Getty
Dramatic police vehicle dash camera video shared with CBS News by the Met shows one of the techniques used by the Interceptors: crashing their own cars or e-bikes right into the suspected thieves to knock them off their wheels.
“We brought in new technology such as e-bikes … we brought in drones, we brought in Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras. We’ve brought in all different levels of technology to hone down on how these criminals are operating,” Commander Andy Featherstone, the Met’s lead officer on phone theft, told CBS News.
He said when a report comes in that a phone has been stolen, “the drone can access the location in a matter of seconds,” and then “you’ve got the eye in the sky, as it were.”
“You’ve then got our Interceptors who are on the ground, and they can pursue and intercept the criminal in a much more safe way than perhaps before, where they would need to be in line of sight to do it and to be able to keep up with them to know where they’re going,” Featherstone said.
CBS News went along for a ride with the Interceptors and saw officers make two arrests after license plate recognition technology flagged a couple of mopeds with links to suspected crimes.
One of the arrests came after a minor driving a moped failed to stop when officers turned their lights on. A check by officers revealed that the young man had been suspected of phone snatching in London’s Ladbroke Grove area just days earlier.
The bigger picture, and a bigger solution
Commander Featherstone told CBS News there are criminal networks behind some of the phone snatching gangs, and that London’s police are becoming more effective at tracing the crimes to their roots.
City of London Police officers are seen during a raid of a property in London used by a suspected member of a phone snatching gang, Feb. 26, 2026. PA Wire/PA Images/Getty
“We discovered that there was an export market here,” he said, adding that many of the stolen devices end up in North Africa or Asia, and China in particular, “where huge amounts of these phones are going there to be broken down as parts.”
British police are now working with American tech giants including Apple and Alphabet to crack down on phone “jailbreaking” — hacking into the operating system to make a device usable by a new, unauthorized owner — to develop technology that ensures stolen devices are useless to anyone but their owner.
“When you remove the value of a stolen phone in the secondhand market, that is when we’ll really break the back of this problem,” Featherstone said.
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