Thieves are reportedly targeting specific models of parcel shelves to meet requests. Photo / Social media
Glass litters the streets of London. Criminals come in the night to smash car windows, grab and flee. It’s a crime wave.
It is not smartphones, handbags or radios these thieves are after, but something far more innocuous.
United Kingdom police forces and community Facebook groups are being inundated with reports of bicycle-mounted thieves stealing parcel shelves from the back of parked cars.
The removable, fabric-covered panels that sit in car boots are then being resold on platforms such as eBay and Gumtree.
Video footage seen by the Telegraph shows a thief pulling up on a bike and smashing in the rear windows of vehicles with a hard object. The car alarm sounds as he takes off, parcel shelf secured under one arm.
The whole operation is complete within 40 seconds.
Criminals can shift the parts for about £50 ($116.03), a disproportionately minor gain when compared to the costs suffered by victims.
Repair companies will charge hundreds of pounds to replace smashed rear windows, depending on the model of the car.
Such is the scale of the crime that the Metropolitan police has issued guidance advising vehicle owners to keep parcel shelves indoors overnight and park their cars in garages or well-lit areas under CCTV coverage.
Thieves are reportedly operating on a steal-to-order basis, targeting specific models to meet requests.
Demand may also be generated by the crime itself, creating a circular economy in which victims replace their stolen parcel shelves with those sold online by criminals.
Isabelle Izzard, a 72-year-old resident of Muswell Hill in north London, fell victim to the parcel shelf thieves twice in two months.
Izzard told the Telegraph that she was asleep during the first incident in mid-June last year.
She said her neighbours “saw one of those Lime bikes resting against our car and they thought ‘well, that’s a bit odd’.
“So they looked across the street and there was a guy with a hoodie. He crossed over to our car and smashed in the rear window.
“They rattled on the window and he looked up and saw them and he casually took the Lime bike and sauntered off down the street, so he didn’t actually get the parcel shelf that first time,” she explained.
Two months later, on August 16, Izzard’s car was targeted again, and this time she had to replace both her rear window and her parcel shelf.
Beyond being given a crime number for her insurance claim, Izzard said she did not hear from the police regarding the incident after they were called to the scene.
The retired civil servant said that this was not the first time she had suffered a vehicle-related crime. The catalytic converter was stolen from her previous car twice in three months.
Between 2019 and 2023, theft of catalytic converters – devices that convert toxic exhaust fumes into safer gases – appeared to have overtaken car stereos as the newest trend in vehicle crime.
Experts say criminals have now turned to parcel shelves as they are lightweight and easy to detach, while catalytic converters can only be removed with high-powered cutting tools.
Coupled with this, modern vehicle security devices such as immobilisers and GPS trackers have made it almost impossible to steal anything else. Valuable gadgets such as sat navs and sound systems are now built into car dashboards, leaving parcel shelves as one of the few removable items.
Izzard said she wrote to Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, after the incidents to express her “concern about the level of crime in the capital” and asked what steps he would take to tackle “everyday crime that affects everyday people”.
She was informed that her concerns had been passed on to a committee and, when she did not hear back, she wrote again. “I’ve heard nothing and yet I continue to see cars with their rear windows smashed in,” she said. “I just felt despondent.”
Izzard pointed out that she lived on “an ordinary London street with Victorian terraced houses, so we haven’t got any garages or anything, so we’ve got to park in the street”.
“I think the police don’t have the resources to go after what they see as petty crime, but it does affect us,” she added.
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