Groups of thieves riding motorized bikes are carrying out a growing number of violent jewelry robberies across New York City, targeting police officers and civilians in fast-moving attacks, according to law enforcement sources and the NYPD.
Police say more than 20 motorized-bike chain snatchings have been reported since September, including at least 10 that involved violence. One law enforcement official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the official figure may represent only a fraction of the incidents occurring citywide.
“There are hundreds of chain snatchings around the city,” the official said.
The officer said some of the robberies have been linked to the Trinitarios, a street gang founded by Dominican inmates at Rikers Island in the early 1990s that has long been associated with criminal activity in the Bronx and upper Manhattan.
“That’s one of their big things — chain snatchings and using two people on a bike to commit robberies,” the official said.
The most serious recent case involved an NYPD detective who was stabbed 10 times earlier this month after confronting two men accused of stealing jewelry. Police sources identified the suspects as migrants.
At least nine other victims have reported being punched, stabbed or knocked to the ground during the sudden attacks, according to authorities.
Federal officials also blamed two alleged Trinitario members riding scooters for shooting an off-duty federal Border Patrol agent at Fort Washington Park in Manhattan on July 9, 2025. The incident later prompted a major gang crackdown.
The January operation, dubbed “Operation Salvo,” resulted in the arrests of 54 alleged gang members, officials said. The 42-year-old law enforcement officer was wounded near West 155th Street in Washington Heights.
Police officers say the mobility of the suspects gives them a significant advantage, allowing them to strike quickly and escape through city traffic.
Some officers also complain that suspects who are arrested are released quickly while their cases move through the courts.
An NYPD officer said department policy and New York City’s sanctuary-city status prevent police from routinely coordinating with federal immigration authorities over a detainee’s immigration status.
“We’re not allowed to confer with ICE, so we just arrest them,” said the officer, who requested anonymity. “They get released on their own recognizance by a judge, and they go back and do it again.”
Bronx bodega worker and Uber driver Jorge Beltre says he experienced that cycle firsthand after two men on scooters confronted him while he was walking his 5-year-old son home from school near Mount Eden Parkway and Sheridan Avenue in Claremont on Oct. 8.
Beltre, 30, said he resisted in an effort to protect his 14-karat gold Cuban-link chain. During the struggle, one of the suspects allegedly pulled a knife and stabbed him in the leg, police said.
Despite the injury, Beltre managed to hold the 17-year-old suspect with help from eight bystanders until police arrived. His son was not hurt, he said. Beltre is originally from the Dominican Republic.
Police said the teenager was charged with robbery and criminal possession of a weapon. Beltre said the Bronx District Attorney’s Office told him the suspect was released on $900 bail.
“The community and I caught one,” Beltre told The Post in Spanish. “Why did they let him go? He didn’t say where the other person is or who he was. I feel outraged. Why was he released?”
“I felt my life was in danger,” Beltre added. “We are living through a scourge. The Bronx is practically being ravaged by these criminals. People are having their chains snatched — two or three incidents a day. The community is fed up.”
The attack has also unsettled Beltre’s young son, who later asked his mother to send him to school with a baseball bat so he could defend himself if he saw the attackers, Beltre said. He added that the men who robbed him were also from the Dominican Republic.
Beltre needed five stitches to close his wound.
The Bronx District Attorneys Office didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.
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In another incident on Sept. 13, a 54-year-old victim told cops he tried to hold onto the motorbike-riding thief who ripped a chain off his neck on Grand Avenue near West 180th Street in the West Bronx.
But the thief accelerated, dragging the victim, who suffered minor injuries and lost his $2,700 chain, cops said.
Two robbers on e-bikes approached a 60-year-old man near Duncan Street and Laconia Avenue in the East Bronx on Sept. 28, displayed a firearm and punched him in the face before snatching $8,000 of jewelry from his neck. He suffered minor injuries.
The motorized muggers are brazen enough to target cops.
An off-duty female office, had her chain snatched at the corner of Arlington and Barbey streets in Brownsville, Brooklyn, on Oct. 10, police sources said.
The crook grabbed a gold necklace that read “Angie” from the 25-year-old’s neck before riding off on a scooter, the sources said. The necklace was worth about $800, the cop reported.
The female officer’s attack came eight days after two criminals stabbed Detective Jose Mercedes, 33, near East 206th Street and Rochambeau Avenue in Norwood in the Bronx as they tried to rip the necklace given to him by his mom off his neck, he told reporters this week.
Mercedes told the crooks several times in both English and Spanish that he was a detective — but “they didn’t care,” he said.
The accused robbers, whom police identified as D’Angelo Caraballo, 25, and Sneider Mejia, 24, fled the scene on an e-bike. Mercedes chased them but collapsed because he was losing so much blood, he said.
Police hunted the duo down outside of Boston and brought them back to New York to face attempted murder charges.
The Department of Homeland Security and ICE said both men have prior criminal records, and are Dominican Republic natives living in the US illegally.
An NYPD spokesperson said the chain-snatchings had been decreasing in the Bronx recently.
“Since the attempted murder of Detective Mercedes, there has been a significant decrease in chain snatches within the confines of Patrol Borough Bronx North,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson added that major crime declined 7% in all five boroughs of the city so far this year, with the Bronx continuing to lead the city with a 12% reduction — to 20,751 so far this year, versus 23,545 in the same period last year.
Surveillance photos released by the NYPD show the robbers often have their faces completely covered and are difficult to identify, police sources said.
Critics lay some of the blame for the troubling trend at the feet of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has called for less enforcement of e-bikers — in purported support the multi-million food app industry. Their lawlessness has surged as cops write fewer tickets.
“Mamdani doesn’t want to enforce summonses against these moped guys because they’re working, but then everyone’s taking advantage of it,” said Michael Alcazar, a former NYPD detective and an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“This is what they do in Third World countries,” he added.
Alcazar thinks the NYPD needs to use the broken-window theory of policing to staunch the epidemic.
“Bad guys have to know we’re enforcing these things,” he said of the tactic in which cops write summonses for small infractions to prevent larger crimes. “That will nip this in the bud.”
A return to the NYPD’s plainclothes anti-crime units, which were disbanded in 2020 under self-described Marxist Mayor Bill de Blasio following protests over George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, would also help, he said.
“Nobody wants to talk about bringing back anti-crime but it’s an effective tool,” Alcazar said of the plainclothes cops. “This is what we did when crime was spiking.”
