Icaraí is the second neighborhood with the most cell phone thefts in Niterói

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The district, which has the most expensive square meter in the city, comes second behind the Center, with 55 incidents of mobile phone theft. The Fonseca neighborhoods complete the ranking, with 22 stolen devices; Santa Rosa, with 12 cases; and Ingá, with 11 occurrences.

The survey also reveals that the volume recorded in the first half of 2025 alone exceeds the total accumulated in each of the last five entire years in the district. The balance for the first half of this year is higher than the annual totals for 2024 (24 records), 2023 (22), 2022 (20), 2021 (13) and 2020 (18).

Icaraí is the most populated neighborhood in Niterói: it has 77,246 inhabitants, according to the 2022 IBGE census, which contributes to the decline of the neighborhood in the general ranking of the city if we compare the rate of thefts per hundred thousand inhabitants, i.e. twentieth position, according to the tool.

Despite the numbers, Icaraí appears to be safer than Rio neighborhoods like Botafogo, which is middle class and has a similar number of residents to Icaraí (around 77,018). There there were 333 cell phone thefts during the same period, 940% more than in Icaraí.

Botafogo also recorded 235 more thefts by passers-by than Icaraí, which recorded 40 in the first half of this year. In Niterói, Icaraí is the third neighborhood with the highest number of incidents of this type, behind Centro (134) and Fonseca (53).

Still according to the investigation, the preferred times for criminals to commit thefts from passers-by and theft of cell phones in the neighborhood are between midnight and 6 a.m.

Luana Martins owns a photography business in Niterói and comments that she and other photographers who work early mornings on the Icaraí coast have felt more insecure in recent months.

— They (criminals) steal on bicycles because they have realized that it is easy to steal and then escape. From 4 a.m. to 6:30 a.m., the time when we work and many people exercise in the street, we do not see police officers on the seafront or patrolling the streets, so the feeling is one of real insecurity — he emphasizes.

According to Jacqueline Muniz, director and professor of public security at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF), the increase in cell phone thefts in Icaraí was predictable.

— It is a neighborhood with a high concentration of income, high urbanization, high traffic density and intense street commerce and services, which increases the exposure of users equipped with higher value smartphones, today also used as banking access tools — he explains.

Still according to the expert, this context favors crimes of opportunity.

— This type of crime is fast and moving. Traditional (police) patrols have little preventive impact, because they are itinerant crimes which escape the logic of fixed and predictable patrols, he concludes.

Another type of theft that has seen a slight increase in the neighborhood, but without a significant increase, is that of vehicles, with seven incidents, one more than in the same period of 2024. Icaraí occupies sixth place in the ranking of vehicle thefts in the city, behind Fonseca, with 21 events; Barreto, with 16 cases; Itaipu and Baldeador, both with 13; and Caramujo, with 12.

On the other hand, for the first time in the historic series, Icaraí eliminated the collective flight in the first half. From 2020 to 2024, there have been 11 cases, including two in the first six months of 2024.