Brandon To is a Politics graduate from UCL and a Hong Kong BN(O) immigrant settled in Harrow.
London has a new kind of crime fighter.
He does not wear a uniform. He is not paid by the Metropolitan Police. He has hundreds of thousands of followers on social media and spends his time watching for pickpockets around London.
His name is Diego Galdino, better known as “Pickpocket London”. And, according to Sadiq Khan, he has played no role in reducing crime.
I find that astonishing.
Diego told Metro that he has helped victims, identified pickpockets and passed information to police. He says that he has seen around 25 suspects arrested, including two who were subsequently deported. He has even noticed that offenders recognise him and leave when they see him coming.
Is he a substitute for the police? Of course not. But why should that mean he deserves no credit?
The Mayor’s response was to praise the Metropolitan Police for bringing phone theft down while dismissing the contribution of “vigilantes”. He is right about one thing: nobody should be encouraged to put themselves in danger or take the law into their own hands.
But he has spread a very wrong message.
He’s telling the public to witness a crime happening and do nothing, except… perhaps call the non-emergency 101 line and wait 45 minutes for someone to pick up.
And he’s telling good citizens not to stand up against crime. You will not be rewarded for stopping it. Worse, you may even face consequences.
I’m not exaggerating, we’ve seen it happen before.
Remember Mark Hehir?
The London bus driver who chased down a thief after he stole a passenger’s necklace, recovered the jewellery and returned it to her, only to be dismissed by Metroline after the thief came back and attacked him. The police took no further action against Hehir, and a police review concluded that his use of force was proportionate and necessary. More than 100,000 people subsequently signed a petition supporting him. At the same time, the London Assembly unanimously called for action to ensure transport workers acting in good faith to protect passengers are treated fairly rather than punished.
Yet, our mayor still refused to act on behalf of the one good Londoner.
Khan had so many ways to help, from pressuring Metroline to helping Mark find another job. Instead, he left the matter where it was.
Think about the message that sends.
You see someone being robbed. You help them. And you might lose your job.
So next time a full bus of passengers watches someone being robbed in silence, don’t ask why all we ended up with was a happy robber and 80 police reports. You helped create this culture yourself, Sir Khan.
And that culture has even started influencing big corporates. As I laid out in my previous column, fearing legal consequences, supermarkets have set up policies forbidding staff from physically intervening when shoplifters steal. Employees are expected to stand back, report what happened, and that’s it. Stopping a shoplifter because you actually care about your store? I’m sorry, you’re fired. It doesn’t matter if you’ve worked at the same Morrisons for 29 years, since you were 17.
Put simply, we are told to be “active bystanders”, just not too active. Perhaps that’s why I find the Mayor’s comments so depressing.
Whilst mayors around the world, even Andy Burnham, stand with their people, we have a Mayor of London who refuses to recognise the contribution Londoners are making, not even a tiny bit.
In other cities, stopping a crime might earn you a citizen’s award. In London, all you get is an application form for unemployment benefits.
Now, of course, there are limits. Again, I’m not suggesting that an elderly pensioner should chase an armed robber down an alleyway, or assault somebody simply because they suspect them of stealing. The police exist for a reason.
But there is a huge space between reckless vigilantism and passive indifference. It’s called civic responsibility, and it is disappearing.
There’s another issue I find daunting.
Sadiq Khan sees London from the grand City Hall. Diego sees it from behind a cardboard box near Victoria, watching for thieves.
The Mayor sees a 14 per cent fall in neighbourhood crime on his City Hall vellum. Diego sees the tourist whose phone has just been taken.
Both realities can be true.
But only one of them is standing on the pavement.
That is what worries me. Politicians are increasingly out of touch and hide behind statistics. Don’t get me wrong, numbers do matter. They tell us whether policies are working. But they do not tell us whether people feel confident walking through their neighbourhood, or whether international tourists think of London as a great city or a great joke. There’s another factor that matters too — public perception.
Diego is perhaps one of the most visible examples showing Britain, and the world, that people are still willing to uphold the law in London. Yet, thanks to politicians living in ivory towers, he may soon be gone.
Conservatives should side with Diego instinctively. We pride ourselves on civic responsibility and strong communities. We support people taking responsibility for their communities, and taking pride in the places they call home.
And in this case that means recognising the citizen who spends his evenings helping police catch pickpockets.
Perhaps recognising Diego Galdino was simply too much to ask of Sir Khan. His knighthood must have stripped him of whatever remaining empathy he had for “peasants” like us.
But he should be careful about the message he sends to the hundreds of thousands of Londoners, and to the criminals, who are paying close attention.
Because when people who step forward are dismissed, while those who cause disorder are repeatedly given another chance, eventually the public learns a very simple lesson:
Keep your head down. Don’t get involved. Let someone else deal with it.
That is not a recipe for a safer London.
That is how you kill the last Good Samaritan.