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Ten Cops Can't Recover Police Chief's Son's iPhone
Hugh Pickens writes "The Oakland Tribune reports that when Berkeley police Chief Michael Meehan's son's cell phone was stolen from a school locker in January, ten police officers were sent to track down the stolen iPhone, with some working overtime at taxpayer expense. 'If your cell phone was stolen or my cell phone was stolen, I don't think any officer would be investigating it,' says Michael Sherman, vice chairman of the Berkeley Police Review Commission, a city watchdog group. 'They have more important things to do. We have crime in the streets.' But the kicker is that even with all those cops swarming around, looking for an iPhone equipped with the Find My iPhone tracking software, police were not able to locate the phone. 'If 10 cops who know a neighborhood can't find an iPhone that's broadcasting its location, that shouldn't give you a lot of confidence in your own vigilante recovery of a stolen iProduct,' writes Alexis Madrigal. 'Just saying. Consider this a PSA: just buy a new phone.'"
That's because the kid had photo's of his dad that he used to blackmail him into getting the iPhone in the first place.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
But when you multiply that times 10, that's pretty smart.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I'm under no illusion that "Find my iphone" will recover my stolen phone, but it's been great for those. "Ah shit where's my phone?" Moments.
Just knowing where it is, or weather or not it's stolen, or if you left it at your friends or your parents house is good enough. Its the unknown quantity that's scary.
The GPS is indeed accurate enough to determine things like. "Oh, it's in my car parked outside" - Done that from both home and work with my iphone and my ipad2 w/3g
If that iPhone was downloading illegal music/movies I bet they would find it in no time.
Perhaps you should read a little harder.
The fact that a service designed to help find stolen iPhones failed to work is why this is here.
Meanwhile, and where I live, the police did recover my brother's cheap-ass Nokia. The cop just sent a request for the phone's location to the mobile operator, along with my brother's signed statement on how he had lost his phone, identified a teenage kid who had stolen before, stopped by his house and got the phone back. Then they called my brother to go pick it up.
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Typical anti-LE first-post karma-grabbing reply.
Did you notice that they were using Find My iPhone? It's an Apple service which requires opting-in on the part of the phone's user (pre-losing the phone, of course.)
The joke you should have made has to do with not being able to find ones ass with 10 cops and a map. These guys had GPS from the phone (via consent of the victim or certainly his father) and couldn't find it. That takes a spectacular level of incompetence.
The truth is, there's a lot of crime and not a lot of money for cops. And for most individuals who are burglarized, there's rarely enough evidence to even begin an investigation. The best you can usually hope for is to have serial numbers for some of your stuff and that when the thief screws up and gets caught, that you'll be able to get your stuff back then. More likely it's already been sold, though.
The other truth is that all jobs have perks. Some people get to read Slashdot during the day. Some people don't have to pay for their own car or cell phone. And some people get more immediate attention from the police. Is it fair? No, but all of these things happen on a daily basis, and there's little sign that they will ever change.
Well, it was a mistake to use the Keystone division...
Right, the trick is that the phone has to be taken to a location that you can uniquely identify, or be given to a person you can uniquely identify.
The problem with any sort of GPS tracking is that it has an error range. If you can pin down that the phone is in my building, but the building has 120 units in it. Is it really worth search 120 units for a 500 dollar phone? Actually maybe it is, if in the long run you set the precedent that the police will hunt you down and arrest you if you steal a 500 dollar phone, but it might not be. Different people will have different tolerances for these things.
One of my friends in san francisco had his iphone stolen with find my iphone on it. The guy who stole it took it to his own house. And as the article states if the police can real time track it guess what? Right. That guy got caught. Take it to an apartment, or an area with a lot of tightly grouped living spaces and you're SOL.
All of which goes to show that all of the phone carriers need to have a stolen device list that will disable stolen phones.
The problem with any sort of GPS tracking is that it has an error range. If you can pin down that the phone is in my building, but the building has 120 units in it. Is it really worth search 120 units for a 500 dollar phone? Actually maybe it is, if in the long run you set the precedent that the police will hunt you down and arrest you if you steal a 500 dollar phone, but it might not be. Different people will have different tolerances for these things.
Is it really worth running roughshod over the privacy of 119 innocent units to discover 1 alleged perpetrator?
Damn, I think I just encouraged them.
The truth is, there's a lot of crime and not a lot of money for cops.
Imagine the law enforcement resources that would be freed up and made available for real crimes (i.e. those with a victim) if we never prosecuted anything that happens among consenting adults. I bet a lot more thieves, rapists, and murderers would be behind bars.
The other truth is that all jobs have perks. Some people get to read Slashdot during the day. Some people don't have to pay for their own car or cell phone. And some people get more immediate attention from the police.
The difference being that everyone pays for police protection but some get better service than others. If you can read Slashdot during the day or have a company-supplied phone, that's between you and your employer. If that really bothered me for some reason, I could choose not to do business with you.
Is it fair? No, but all of these things happen on a daily basis, and there's little sign that they will ever change.
Maybe you didn't intend it this way but that sounds rather defeatist. None of that is a reason to give up and stop calling attention to abuses wherever they happen. None of that means we shouldn't expect better. If we never scrutinized these things, it would be far worse than it is right now.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
The other truth is that all jobs have perks. Some people get to read Slashdot during the day. Some people don't have to pay for their own car or cell phone. And some people get more immediate attention from the police. Is it fair? No, but all of these things happen on a daily basis, and there's little sign that they will ever change.
This isn't about fairness, it is about abuse of power. None of your other examples involve the public trust. The cops get all kinds of special privileges to enable them to do their jobs, so they have a higher standard to up hold than some guy driving to the grocery store in his company car.
The reason there is little sign that this kind of abuse of power will stop is in part due to people making false equivalancies to excuse it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
These guys had GPS from the phone (via consent of the victim or certainly his father) and couldn't find it. That takes a spectacular level of incompetence.
I think it illustrates limitations in the technology more than human incompetence. The service can't find your phone. It can tell you that your phone is near 55th and San Pedro, but it's not going to tell you which house and room the thing is sitting in, or whose pocket it has been put in. I bet I can stash a phone "near" any intersection in the country and you wouldn't be able to find it with only that information.
Notice that I'm not suggesting a solution... the service does what it does, but it's not a panacea for finding lost things.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Find My iPhone has a feature that allows you to play a tone, even if the phone is on silent.
Of course, if the phone is off, you're screwed. At least you can remotely wipe it.
Um, how much would you value a rape, then? Or a beating? Or domestic violence? Or even murder?
It would be interesting to see a world where such calculations are being performed.
Oh, so the guy punched you repeatedly in the face and stole 100 USD from you? Right. How much was the hospital charging you? 2000 USD? I see. So that's a total of 2100 USD. Well, we can have one officer spend 5 days investigating this, then tough luck buddy. Maybe next time you'll get lucky and he'll stab you in the liver, I heard those wounds are expensive to heal and we'd be able to investigate the incident for one whole month.
Yeah, would be interesting to live in such a world, indeed...
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Just this past weekend my wife lost her iPhone after stopping at a highway rest area. I knew from Find My iPhone that it was at the rest area, but there was no phone on the grass at the GPS point. Then the point moved to the far side of the parking lot. It wasn't there, either. It moved several more times, all of which led to the conclusion that it had to be inside - that despite claiming a location and even drawing an accuracy circle on the map, it was not where it claimed to be. I searched inside several buildings, had the attendants check the ladies' room (all the while using Find My iPhone to make the phone beep).
Finally, after over an hour, an attendant and I went out to the dumpsters in back, stuck our heads in, and heard it ringing. That guided us to the right bag, and lo and behold, there it was.
So yes, Find My iPhone was terrific in that without it, I would never have been able to recover my wife's iPhone. However, given what I went through in an otherwise relatively empty area, I can't imagine what one would do if the signal was coming from near a large apartment complex, a school, a parking garage, even a dense neighborhood of single-family homes could show the GPS point in the wrong location if the phone's inside. Sometimes it's just better to take advantage of the remote wipe feature and start all over.
I cannot, of course, defend in any way the use of police resources in this particular case. I'm sure we'd all want to help our kid out similarly, but I imagine the smart among us would have done it informally and off the clock.
Michael J.
Root, God, what is difference?
I think it illustrates limitations in the technology more than human incompetence. The service can't find your phone. It can tell you that your phone is near 55th and San Pedro, but it's not going to tell you which house and room the thing is sitting in, or whose pocket it has been put in. I bet I can stash a phone "near" any intersection in the country and you wouldn't be able to find it with only that information.
Notice that I'm not suggesting a solution... the service does what it does, but it's not a panacea for finding lost things.
I bet I can find the stolen iPhone. I would do what every other LE officer would do. He would walk up to the location and then call the lost iPhone's cell number. Then with probable cause he could seize any phone that rang and was answered matching the audio he heard with his observation of the suspects lips.
This happens nearly every day in the USA. I think it is hilarious when the cops seize guns and a large drug stash at the same time from the perp and his urban buddies. My favorite form of instant justice is hearing there were panicked perps who jumped out of a second floor or higher window injuring themselves only to be caught by more backup cops waiting below.
Really? I use Find My iPad to find my iPad in my _house_. "Ah, the kids left it behind the couch."
The truth is, there's a lot of crime and not a lot of money for cops. And for most individuals who are burglarized, there's rarely enough evidence to even begin an investigation.
That's why I'm part of our Neighborhood Watch. If I see a stranger in our neighborhood acting odd or dressed like a thug, then I'll confront them. That approach has worked pretty well for me, until recently.
Don't even has to call it. You can tell the phone to make a noise that can't be needed.
It's distinctive to the find my iPhone feature, and it is pretty damning.
same guy sent a COP over to a REPORTERS house at MIDNIGHT because he was worried about a story which was about to run.
http://www.dailycal.org/2012/03/10/berkeley-police-chief-sends-officer-to-reporters-home/
Berkeley Police Chief Michael Meehan ordered a sergeant to the home of a reporter around 12:45 a.m. Friday to request changes to a story that Meehan felt inaccurately portrayed him, media outlets reported this weekend.
Garbage men have a fatality rate of 30 per 100,000 according to http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/pf/jobs/1108/gallery.dangerous_jobs/8.html
Law enforcement has a fatality rate of 14 per 100,000 according to http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/archive/summer1999art1.pdf
Different years, but police fatality rates haven't more than doubled in ten years.
http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfch0009.pdf has farmers/ranchers at 42 per 100,000
And http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2010/news/1004/gallery.Most_dangerous_jobs/10.html has taxi drivers at 19 per 100,000.
So out of farmers, garbage men, taxi drivers, and police the police have the safest (in terms of not getting killed) job.
IANASCJ, but the key word is "probable".
If there are two apartments, and a felony suspect went into one of them, and one of them houses a person with a long arrest record and the other doesn't, a judge may approve the search order as probable cause. And if it doesn't pan out, they now know have probable cause for the other house.
But much more than that, and the fourth amendment protection trumps the police's desire to catch the criminal.
Only when life and health is in imminent danger can they bypass this - if there is someone sniping from an apartment complex, they can search the entire premises because saving lives trumps the fourth amendment protection. Likewise for a bomb threat. But if it's a thief or pot smoker, they need to get an approved search warrant for every apartment they want to search.
AndroidLost is some clever software which does a few glorious things with lost devices, including bright lights, loud noises, taking (and delivering) pictures, making maps, and displaying messages. Also (remotely) supports wipe, basic file management, setting a passcode, and hiding itself from the app list. And it does this stuff in response to either SMS messages or from data originating in Teh Cloud.
And, it's clever enough to be completely not-running-at-all unless activated, so the performance hit when the phone is not lost is exactly zero.
Kid-proof tablet..