I nearly lost my bike to London’s angle grinder thieves
Some 80,000 bikes are stolen in London every year. Barney Davis speaks to Mark Vinall, who stopped his Specialized model from becoming 80,001.
Locking my bicycle to railings in the middle of the day while reporting for The Independent, I foolishly assumed my two wheels would be safe.
Returning several hours later, I found two police officers standing over it as its anti-theft alarm rang out. “You’re lucky it’s still here mate, this guy stopped the thief,” said one of the officers, signalling a grey-haired man.
Mark Vinall, a pony-tailed cameraman, had been staging a live segment for the evening news when he saw orange sparks flying as a large hooded man hunched over my red onyx bike frame.
Covering crime in London, I am used to people filming mobile e-bike phone grabs, stabbings and even a street fight with nunchucks. But you rarely see the cameraman step in and turn the tables on the culprit .
The video shows Mr Vinall chasing away this huge balaclava-clad would-be thief holding a power tool.
“Look at me!” he shouts, trying to pull off the would-be thief’s mask and commit his face to celluloid. But the only thing you can see in the shaky footage is the fear in his eyes.
The man turns to flee, taking the angle-grinder with him as he narrowly dodges a passing car.
“Get yourself run over, you!”, Mr Vinalls yells before apologising for his behaviour to a shocked onlooker: “Sorry, he’s trying to steal that bike”.
Reflecting on the encounter a day later, the cameraman said: “I just can’t stand people who take advantage of others. People like that just annoy me. He was so blatant. I just thought, ‘You can’t do that.’
“He thinks he could frighten me with an angle grinder but I’m used to things like that from my workshop at home.”
The would-be thief was as determined as he was incompetent, coming back three times before police finally arrived.
“I was 20 minutes away from going on air when I called them so of course they turned up just as we went live,” says Mr Vinall. “We caught the blue lights turning the corner which made our package look a bit more exciting, to be fair.
“People in London are braver than you think. You have to think about that guy with the Narwhal tusk on London Bridge – people do behave like that.”
A Met Police told The Independent that investigations continue, with no arrests made so far.