Slashdot Mirror
UK Street Crime Rise Blamed on iPods
CNET reports that the British Government today attributed the country's 22% rise in street crime to iPod robberies. This has hit CNET close to home. Guy Cocker, a CNET (Gamespot) journalist based in London, was mugged last week. The muggers held 'a semi-automatic weapon to the back of Cocker's head and told him, "we're taking all your stuff"'. CNET's solution to the problem is suggestions on how to conceal your iPod from attackers. These include 'The gaffer tape method,' 'The Coke can method,' and 'The Christopher Walken method.'
wthout those baaad baaad guns this would have never happened!
Oh wait...
how long until
So it's our jobs' fault for giving us money that can be stolen?
The fault of car makers that cars get stolen?
I'm a bit confused.
Really, now... is this the fault of the iPod and not the punk-ass thugs doing this crap?
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Replace the earplugs with ones with black cables.
a) Aluminium isn't magnetic, it wouldn't hold the can closed
b) Is it really that good an idea to have a magnet that close to your ipod?
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
I was hoping it'd show you how to dance like a maniac then fly off into the sky :(
How about walking around without listening to music the whole time?
98,204 - 90,747 = 7,457 More
7,457 / 90,747 = 8.2% Rise from the original level
22%? WTF?
As far as I can tell, a big part of the reason for having an iPod is meant to be because it looks stylish. Basically, the whole point is for it to be seen. If you're going to start trying to disguise your iPod, wouldn't it be a better option to just get a cheaper and/or better music player from another company?
Don't take the above poster too seriously. He doesn't.
According to the article, the cause of street crime is 1) High tech gadgets like Ipods and phones. 2) Social conditions leading to poverty. shouldn't the criminals figure in these somewhere?
Summary:
TFA:
For all I know an opened glass coke bottle feels exactly like a semi-automatic weapon when it is pressed into the back of a persons head. The words felt like make all the difference.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Just don't wear those white earbuds and I probably ... I mean, they probably won't notice that you have iPods.
There should be a "-1:Groupthink"
TFA misses out on the interesting bit of the article:
"His assailants held what felt like a semi-automatic weapon to the back of Cocker's head"
Wow, he can differentiate a semi-automatic from a nonautomatic from an automatic, just based on how it presses against the back of his head.
Note how the Slashdot summary changes things:
"The muggers held 'a semi-automatic weapon to the back of Cocker's head"
I posted the fact that it's about 8% above, and found a BBC article that explains it's a 22% rise in robberies to 311,000, involving a 10% rise in gunpoint robberies and with street robberies and muggings jumping by 8%.
Yeah, but the story in the US would be titled something like "City crime rate increasing for 10th straight year; homicide biggest crime increase"
(Before anyone turns this into a matter of gun control alone, note that countries like Switzerland and Norway, with HUGE amounts of weapons in private ownership, including AG-3's in about 1/3'd of homes in Norway, have firearms related violence rates not much different from the UK - it's much more complicated than gun control or not)
If muggers knew they could get a cap in their ass, they'd think twice before committing these dastardly deeds.
No they wouldn't. You see, over here (UK) we have a bill called the Human Rights Act. What it boils down to is that if you commit a crime then you can avoid jail because it's dangerous and infringes on your Human Rights.
This also means that you could sue the police for shooting you.
Summation 2
What a shame the UK disarmed their citizenry
Point 1: We were never armed to start with - this is largely an American idea "the right to bear arms" and is not seen in other parts of the world as a good thing.
Point 2: Technically we are subjects not citizens. (We have a monarch as head of state not a president)
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I think gun control is an all or nothing deal.. either you do it perfectly, and it reduces crime, or you dont' do it, and upstanding citizens being able to shoot back reduces crime... the US half-ass approch is what doesn't work.
ian
"he hid it in the one place he knew he could hide somethin'"
I give up. Where??
Now there's an interesting question there - is the rise in iPod thefts due to the fact that iPods, associated with white earbuds, are more popular and hence worth stealing? Or is it simply because the white earbuds are more visible at night, thus making their owner a more obvious target?
Do you blame car thefts on the awesomeness of a car? How about rape on the attractiveness of the victim? Why then would you blame ipods for getting stolen? Blame the criminals.
See in Scotland we dont have Ipods yet, but ukele and banjo crime has gone through the roof
Is all this crime the result of shiny inanimate objects or really stupid policies?
One favorite paragraph:
It is not difficult to guess the reason for the senior policeman's anger. My wife had forced his men to record a crime that they had no intention whatever of even trying to solve (though, with due expedition, it was eminently soluble), and this record in turn meant the introduction of an unwanted breath of reality into the bogus statistics, the manufacture of which is now every British senior policeman's principal task--with the sole exception of enforcing the dictates of political correctness, thereby to head off the criticism levied at them for many decades by the liberal Left--not always without an element of justification. Proving their purity of heart is now more important to them than securing the safety of our streets: and thus Nero fiddled while Rome burned.
Also, nice to see that gun control laws work the way we Second Amendment supporters said they would.
Here are some of the recomendations from TFA:
If, after following all of the above guidelines, your iPod should happen to be stolen, contact the RIAA as quickly as possible and inform them of all the illegal music you have stored on it, then wait for them to subpeona your assailiant and recover your costs in an out of court settlement.
Yeah, because letting people run around with guns really solved the USA's violent crime problem, didn't it?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
As a Londoner I'm pretty sure there was no gun involved. This guy was the victim of the classic 'banana in the small of the back' scam as portrayed in so many movies. It can be scary if the guy looks mad enough. Happened to me once, 5 years ago and I never saw the gun - just a 6'4 crackhead. In the end I just walked away with half of me just waiting to be shot in the back. It didn't happen fortunately.
As someone else said, if you've got a real gun in London you're not jacking iPods with it - you're doing something a little larger in scope. However, I'm not sure that this isn't changing with some younger people - gun crime is certainly increasing.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I would reword the grandparent as:
When walking through dodgy parts of town, best to keep your wits about you.
Pumping loud music through your ears when you should be using your senses for protection and information is idiotic at best.
liqbase
Why didn't they mention two most important steps you can take to prevent this kind of thing:
- Be aware of your surroundings at all times. Your music is great, but it should never make you oblivious, and it should never be high enough in volume that you can't hear people (or traffic) around you in a potentially unsafe situation. (i.e., not at home/office)
- Don't look like a victim. It's amazing how many would-be criminals are put off by the simple fact that someone's head is up and their eyes are alert. There are many easier-looking targets for them.
Those two simple things are the first things you will learn in any self-defense class.Of course criminals should take the blame. But we also have to look a bit beyond that if we want to solve the problem. What I'm saying that given the question "what causes crime?" the answer "criminals" is completely useless because it's a tautology.
Yes, if somebody mugs me, I definitely want the bastard in jail, but simply catching people and throwing them into a cell doesn't solve the original problem.
Example: Let's suppose this guy was a heroin addict. In a moment of desperation he decided to mug me because that was the quickest way he could find to get the cash to get more heroin. Would he still have done that if he could get his drug cheaply (the war on drugs drastically inflates price)? Or take the requirement to pass a drug test to get a job. If you have an addicted person that needs money for rehabilitation and you close the legal ways for them to earn it, what options do they have left?
Crime is much more complicated than whether or not the citizenry is armed. There are many countries with near prohibitions on guns that have high crime, and many countries with lots of guns that have low crime, and vice versa. Allowing responsible citizens to be armed, however, never really increases gun crime, so there is little reason to prevent it. As the saying goes, if you put a bunch of guns in the middle of a town with low crime, you will get low crime. Guns don't magically make people into criminals. They do, however, put law-abiding citizens on a level playing field with criminals. And that, I think, is the best we can expect to do.
The real secret to fighting crime is to catch criminals and make sure that they stay in jail until they are no longer a threat to society. This novel concept appears to be diminishing as time goes on. I recall that Britain just passed a law that allows burgulars to essentially get the first one free. That makes utterly no sense and will serve only to increase the rate of burglary in the UK.
~moofbong
If 'con' is the opposite of 'pro', what is the opposite of 'progress'?
It's like saying digging with shovel creates large amount of treasure on treasure island. The problem's with the people on the street - finding that when presented with an oppertunity to steal from someone else - they will do. That's the level it needs to be addressed at - the people on the street level. To attempt to address this problem at the ipod level is just a waste of time and distracting. A more suitable headline might be British People - violent and prone to theft (disclaimer I am British)
Now, if the pro-gun argument is that having guns would somehow allow you to defend yourself and prevent thefts happening - well would you? If you had a gun at the back of your neck, you'd get out your gun and try to shoot first, despite the high probability that you'd end up dead?
In places where the laws have gone from can't-carry to can-carry, there's good evidence to chew on. When, in general, your average willing-to-use-violence street thug type doesn't know if an intended victim may or may not be carrying a deadly weapon, such crimes go down. States like Florida are good examples.
In places where the laws have gone from might-be-carrying to only-criminals-can-be-carrying (or worse, only-criminals-can-even-possess-them-at-all) such crimes go up.
But I agree with the other comments that find it silly to blame the iPods. You have to blame the people willing to steal anything for the act of stealing. Before it was iPods, it was just cash. iPod lust is just another facet of the growing culture of entitlement. Fix that, and you fix, well, a whole lot of things - including much of what fuels many sorts of violence and the need to defend against it.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
They key to this problem is the mugger can pick out the people with iPods from across the street, because of the super-visible white earbuds. He *knows* this guy has at least one thing valuable, so the mugging risk is worth it.
If the person has a cord going from a set of *black* earbuds to a device in their pocket, it could be an iPod, or a $4.95 FM radio - so he's less likely to take his chances.
Buy a set of decent black or grey earbuds and ditch the trendy iPod ones. It's like wearing a bullseye on your jacket.
Thanks for the link, I've been looking for a source like that. I think you'll find it interesting to know that the country with the second most firearms per capita is Finland, yet our firearm related murders per capita is smaller than that of countries like Canada and the Netherlands, and nowhere even close to the rate of the US. So obviously the problem lies elsewhere than in the number of weapons. My guess would be the harsher penalties in the US, if you know your going to be locked up for a long time or even put to death, then it's better to leave less evidence and witnesses to make your chances of evading capture better.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
which is why crimes committed witha firearm continue to rise in the UK.
hmmm...
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
From the wiki:
There has always been a distinction in English law between the subjects of the monarch and aliens
Bloody 'ell, it seems like David Icke was right!
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I prefer my right to not allow some drunk jackass to have a gun in my vicininty. If the government wants to put me in prison or kill me, having a handgun will not change that. Poland had an entire army, and Germany still walked all over it. If guns made countries safer, the US would be the safest country in the western world, as it is, it isn't anywhere near the top of that list.
Because NOT letting people run around with guns really solved Washington DC's and Chicago's violent crime problem, didn't it?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
The bit about restructuring society so these things don't happen made me laugh. I live in a fairly nice neighborhood where people leave their front doors unlocked and garage doors open all day. Sometimes somebody will steal something but it's so rare it's not an issue for most people around here.
Fifteen years ago, a neighbor murdered his wife during a divorce proceeding. Hard to see how you restructure rage and jealousy out of society. Around the same time there was a 5 year old kid who was uncontrollable. The kid had a sibling who was fine but this kid was trouble at any gathering. You could feel sympathy for the parents because you could see them doing what any of us would have done and nothing worked with this kid. At 20, he's in jail for invading someone's home and pistol whipping the occupant. He had a sidekick, also from this neighborhood, who isn't very bright. He's in jail as well.
I just don't see how anyone could have done anything for that pair - some genetic combinations just don't work very well. They'll spring up in both bad and good neighborhoods. No matter how you structure a society, there'll be people that are not a good fit for that society.
As a guess, DRM survives but looses his plasma TV, while Pete looses his plasma TV and is killed in the following shoot-out, since the robbers use AK-47s. Three other bystanders are also killed by stray bullets and shotgun blasts, and one child is killed by the police who turn up later and shoot at anything that moves.
Alternatively, both DRM and Pete move to England, where they both make it obvious they have a lot of expensive stuff in their houses, and as a result are not invited to join the local golf club.
And people only say a curt "Good Morning" to them when they meet them in the street.
After 6 months of this DRM goes off to borrow Pete's shotgun, and they both do the decent thing.
I would like to point out that if BOTH the major parties would respect ALL of the people's constitutionally protected rights then perhaps some of us wouldn't feel the need to stock up for Civil War 2.
Glesga Kiss is a Glasgow slang for headbutt, also known as glasgow kiss ;)