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Comment by indy | Hacker News Reader

"Says who?" Then we are living in separate universes because this is common knowledge.

Wearing a nice watch in Soho, Liverpool Street, Tower Bridge is super sketchy and you're likely to get comments about how 'brave' (stupid) you are. These are just the places I've been to, West London is meant to be much worse.

Edit: Here are some links I found

- "Machete-ban petition launched as London watch robberies rise" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-64991862

- Statistics for stolen watches from 2018 to 2023 https://www.met.police.uk/foi-ai/metropolitan-police/disclos...

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Again, never heard it. Never felt remotely unsafe. Don't know anyone who has had issues with it.

And can't find any actual data to corroborate that robberies have somehow reached such endemic levels.

EDIT: It gets comical to see that Met stats are now somehow trustworthy after the number of people here making a big deal of distrusting them. But notably the data shows the numbers to be small - in the hundreds per month - and having dropped significantly between 2018 and 2023. Furthermore, most of these crimes are burglary or theft, rather than crimes such as robberies or violence, so the chance of having them taken off your wrist is substanlly lower.

The article then covers an increase in "high-value" watch thefts from 2021 to 2022. Between 2021 and 2022 the numbers did in fact increase, and they were lower in 2021 than in 2023 as well. But we're talking 4885 watches total (not restricted to "high value") in 2021, of which about 1/3 are robberies. So you're much less likely to have your watch taken off you than e.g. your phone stolen.

Just past the edit window, so let me also add that the article points out a number of "high-value" watch thefts that suggests about a quarter of these thefts on a yearly basis would be "high-value".

If anything, these articles have made me feel more secure rather than less secure - these numbers are tiny given the size of London.

Sure, maybe don't go around flashing your watch if it's worth tens of thousands of pounds.

You're right probably nothing, just a far right conspiracy theory:

"I hunt phone thieves professionally – I was still targeted on Oxford Street Former detective turned private investigator warns some London areas have become ‘lawless’" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/15/phone-thieves-ox...

"Some 78,000 people had phones or bags snatched from them on the street in the year ending March 2024, according to the Crime Survey for England and Wales.

That is equivalent to 200 “snatch thefts” a day and is a 153 per cent increase on the number of incidents in the year ending March 2023.

London is seen as the “epicentre” of phone thefts with £50 million worth of handsets reported stolen in the capital in 2024.

In a blitz on the “scourge of mobile phone theft” in February, Met officers arrested 230 people in just a week and recovered 1,000 handsets by targeting hotspots such as Westminster and the West End."

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