For the past few weeks, the Chennai police have been receiving several complaints of mobile-phone snatching in Chromepet. The criminals were typical young – as young as school kids sometimes, and they typically targeted women with high-end phones.
With several complaints coming in, the police decided to launch a unit for the offenders, and started collecting footage from CCTV cameras in the area.
“One piece of footage, caught on a camera installed outside an apartment on New Colony 6th Street on Wednesday night, showed two boys, clad in school uniform, snatching a mobile phone from a woman and running to their motorbike before speeding away,” reports TOI.
The woman victim managed to note down the license plate of the bike and reported it to the police.
When the police were running a routine check on Chromepet flyover, they apprehended the bike and the two boys on it. They were detained and taken to the police station, where they broke down to tell the truth.
According to TOI, it was a 10-member gang of juvenile offenders which snatched high-end mobile phones in and around Chromepet. Six of the boys were students of government schools, three studied in a polytechnic college, and one went to an arts college, according to the police. All of them were first time offenders. According to The New Indian Express, they were all aged between 15 and 19, and nearly 13 phones were seized from them.
A police officer said the boys decided to snatch mobile phones to meet their daily expenses, and some of them used it themselves. They targeted those with smartphones as they fetched quick money and were easier to sell, according to TOI.