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Bloomberg: Steve Jobs Behind NYC Crime Wave
theodp writes "Rudy Giuliani had John Gotti to worry about; Mike Bloomberg has Steve Jobs. Despite all-time lows for the city in homicides and shootings, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg said overall crime in New York City was up 3.3% in 2012 due to iPhone, iPad and other Apple device thefts, which have increased by 3,890 this year. 'If you just took away the jump in Apple, we'd be down for the year,' explained Marc La Vorgna, the mayor's press secretary. 'The proliferation of people carrying expensive devices around is so great,' La Vorgna added. 'It's something that's never had to be dealt with before.' Bloomberg also took to the radio, urging New Yorkers who didn't want to become a crime statistic to keep their iDevices in an interior, hard-to-reach pocket: 'Put it in a pocket in sort of a more body-fitting, tighter clothes, that you can feel if it was — if somebody put their hand in your pocket, not just an outside coat pocket.' But it seems the best way to fight the iCrime Wave might be to slash the $699 price of an iPhone (unactivated), which costs an estimated $207 to make. The U.S. phone subsidy model reportedly adds $400+ to the price of an iPhone. So, is offering unlocked alternatives at much more reasonable prices than an iPhone — like the $299 Nexus 4, for starters — the real key to taking a bite out of cellphone crime? After all, didn't dramatic price cuts pretty much kill car stereo theft?"
I imagine that most people (such as myself) don't carry any significant quantity of cash on them anymore since most every Retailer and Restaurant will take a Visa Debit card issued from your bank.
So it only makes sense to go after iPhones and iPads since going after someone's wallet will typically net you $60 or less, while you can offload that shiny iGadget for a couple hundred.
If it weren't iDevices, it'd be something else.
The real culprit here is a profound culture shift from cash based shopping to electronic payments.
Does that imply the $699 unlocked price of the Samsung SIII isn't a high amount since thieves mostly target the iPhone?
I hope not. The variable being ignored is brand recognition. You're going to have an easier time and probably ultimately make more money off of selling Toyota Corollas on the black market than you are PT Cruisers, simply because more people in the area tend to buy Corollas than PT Cruisers. In the US, it's fairly safe to assume that the iPhone has the brand recognition over the SIII, so it's a safer bet to sell iPhones on the black market than SIIIs. That seems to be a shrinking gap between the two, but it is still there in the US.
BradleyUffner is partially right, though, in that there's not going to be as much demand to pay $400 on the black market what you can buy for similar or less legally. There'll still be some black market present probably, no matter the cost you lower it to, but the lower the price, the less attractive the black market alternative is going to be. Also, at a certain point, when its easier to get it legally and price is no longer an issue, there's probably going to be less people interested in the alternative deal that the black market will present to them.
Although one has to wonder how big the market for iPhones really is. It's not the like the vast majority of consumers aren't stuck paying one of the big carriers for a monthly sub anyway, and for them how much cheaper is a stolen iPhone than the carrier price anyway?
But then with phones it's a little easier. The EU has been working on this, stolen phones should be blacklisted from carriers. If you can't resell them, what is the point of stealing them? There is still the overseas market but it eliminates a lot of the casual disorganized piracy, and the EU and US databases should be able to talk to each other.