The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police tells us that 500 officers will be released from post-11 September security work to tackle the epidemic of mobile-phone muggings. This follows Home Office research revealing an estimated 190 per cent increase in thefts of this nature since 1995.

But I suspect - and the Home Office research provides some support for this view - that the phenomenon has already peaked. It is hardly mugging, in any case - more a grab-and-flee crime perpetrated by juveniles upon juveniles.

A year ago in this column, I mentioned an incident that happened as my 16-year-old daughter was talking on her mobile phone while walking through an alleyway at the side of Brixton Tube Station. A young man on a bicycle snatched her phone and sped off. She chased him, kicked him off his bike and inflicted several blows on him. He crumbled, trembled and pleaded for mercy. She got the phone back.

Her friend - like her, a cadet in a south London corps - responded in the same manner when a similar thing happened to her a few days later.

The authoritarian attitude prevalent in our society today assumes that only an increase in the numbers of police is the solution. But there are other approaches. The principal of one south London comprehensive, faced with complaints of mobile-phone mugging, banned students from bringing them into school. Another school decided to seize all phones and return them only on proof of ownership. Yet another discovered that a local Fagin was doing a roaring trade in phones and enlisted the help of the local police in bringing the receiver of stolen goods to justice.

A woman friend who lives on a London estate told me that, at around 2am one morning, she heard her daughter in relaxed conversation in the adjoining bedroom. She crept next door and found her on a mobile phone. She hadn't bought one for her daughter, nor could her daughter account for its purchase. At the weekly tenants' meeting, she alerted other parents about the trade.

There is also the issue of market forces - we are moving to saturation point, particularly at the cheaper end of the market. One policeman told me that, when officers raid the homes of known thieves, they sometimes find five or six mobile phones that cannot be shifted.

But the market is holding steady for the more expensive handsets, costing £300 and upwards. These can be resold for £80, and they are owned largely by the white middle classes who live cheek by jowl with the proletariat in urban areas of London such as Hackney and Brixton. The snatching point is outside Tube stations, where the owners bring out their phones to check the messages that have accumulated while they were underground.

It is a status symbol for young people to own a mobile phone. (Not, though, the antique model I carry - my daughter and her friends refer to that kind as "bricks". ) They are deemed second-raters and members of the fashion underclass if they are without a mobile phone.

Thus capitalism seduces otherwise law-abiding young people. The manufacturers, as it happens, could easily disable stolen phones by fitting them with a device that gives off a deafening bleep when the theft is notified. But that, besides the device being costly to insert, would choke off further sales to the victims of mugging.

In Brixton, the police and community have worked hard to secure a healthy relationship. It will be undermined by the deployment on the streets of traffic police from elsewhere who are strangers to the turf. Market forces and local policing, allied with people's increased awareness of the risks, should be enough to halt the increase in thefts.

Leave the rest to the insurers, I say.