Muggers, your time is up!

Stoke-on-Trent might have a reputation as a backward place... an industrial wasteland where residents have never travelled more than five miles down the road; a city where the tracksuit bottom and hair scrunchie remain de rigeur.
Then there's that oft-trotted-out gem... "It might be a dump but the people are ever so friendly. You won't find friendliness like it. And the pies are dead cheap an' all."
Now though, our national profile could be about to get a boost. 'Why?' I hear you cry.
Because of the good old boys (and girls) in blue at Staffordshire Police. Yep, if you want a city that innovates and brings ground-breaking, forward-thinking solutions to old problems, you want to be in Hanley.
You see the city's Central Forest Park has apparently become a bit of a hotbed for muggers and mobile phone thieves. They've been targeting kids at an award-winning skate plaza, cunningly asking them for the time.
When these nippers on four wheels get their mobile phones out to check the hour (watches, unlike the tracksuit bottom, are SO last season), the strangers with a passion for punctuality half-inch their phones.
And, bang! The cops are left with another crime stat to add to the databse.
So what's the answer? More bobbies on the beat? Hauling some of these muggers before the courts and making an example of them in The Sentinel?
Come, come... what an old-fashioned approach to fighting crime you have.
The answer (stupid!) is to stick a big clock on a lamp-post in the park. Then, when those cunning crooks ask their victims for the time, they'll simply reply: "Look, dude, there's like a big clock on that lamp-post, like. Are you blind?"
At which point the would-be phone thief will be thwarted and, through sheer frustration, chin the skater in question instead. Adding nicely to the crime stats for assault.
It's genius.