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Smartphones Driving Violent Crime Across US
alphadogg writes "Incidents of cellphone theft have been rising for several years and are fast becoming an epidemic. IDG News Service collected data on serious crimes in San Francisco from November to April and recorded 579 thefts of cellphones or tablets, accounting for 41 percent of all serious crime. In just over half the incidents, victims were punched, kicked or otherwise physically intimidated for their phones, and in a quarter of robberies, users were threatened with guns or knives. This isn't just happening in tech-loving San Francisco, either. The picture is similar across the United States. A big reason for such thefts, until recently, is that there had been little to stop someone using a stolen cellphone. Reacting to pressure from law enforcement and regulators, the U.S.'s largest cellphone carriers agreed early last year to establish a database of stolen cellphones."
We should enact more stringent controls for cellphone ownership. These cell nuts going around with their smartphones putting us all in danger. What do you need a 30 app mag for realistically. How am i supposed to be safe when any criminal/cell nut can just pull out their cellphone and thats it, bang, im dead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMEI
Steeling the most shiny, but least valuable shit because they just don't understand. They lack knowledge. And if they had it they wouldn't need to resort to steeling it.
I'm not saying this is true in every case, but probably in greater then 70% of them.
Such a stupid situation that could be solved easily.
If the carriers had a service for the owner to remotely brick and unbrick the phone as well as transfer ownership (with the ability to brick) to another person this would be a non-issue.
It's a service that makes owning the phone more valuable to the end-user; yet, it's an externality to the phone companies. Rather than provide the best possible product and services, they do the barest minimum and reap unjustly high profits. They can do this because they operate out of the normal reach of capitalism - the state-sponsored monopoly. With a stranglehold on public property and the blessings of their government lawmakers, they can do pretty-much whatever they want. Capitalism has failed, therefore we need more government regulation.
That should greatly shorten this discussion. Did I miss any memes?
Sorry, cell phone theft is not serious crime. Serious crime is genocide, murder, rape, molesting children, kidnapping, torture, etc.
Sticking a gun in somebody's face, threatening them with a knife, or beating them are serious crimes. The others you listed are more serious but this isn't some case of some iPhanboi having an emotional breakdown because his iToys were stolen, if you read TFA you'd notice a great mean of these robberies are armed, involve physical violence, or the direct threat of it. Maybe that isn't "serious" where you come from, but if it isn't, you have my sympathies. Let me know if you need me to recommend a good realtor.
Who did what now?
Sorry, cell phone theft is not serious crime. Serious crime is genocide, murder, rape, molesting children, kidnapping, torture, etc.
So I can come over and punch you in the head a few times, and then steal a few TVs? Assault and theft over $500 is serious crime.
Would they add some sort of hard-coded serial number chip that phones home whenever the device is online? I strongly doubt that such a feature would remain uncracked for very long. At best, it might be something that an observant Craigslist buyer could use to distinguish a hacked device from an unhacked one. I think that's the first realistic goal to aim at. I was close to buying an iPod Touch on Craigslist, but backed out because the situation seemed shady, and I didn't know how to verify whether the device was stolen. I know it's tempting to hope that we can use the phone itself to catch thieves and prevent unauthorized transfers, but I don't think we should ever expect to succeed. Every decent phone thief can just power down a phone right after stealing it, and disable the security in a makeshift Faraday cage workshop. All this will do is to provide a perfect spy tool on legitimate phone owners.
Getting raped by TSA is a serious crime, but hey, in the USA, some serious crimes are "legal".
So I can come over and punch you in the head a few times, and then steal a few TVs?
You could try... but I don't have a TV.
The loss itself may not be, but if you beat somebody up for their phone it's still a violent crime.
I think the more interesting statistic is that 579 cell phone/tablet thefts accounts for 41% of violent crime. Even if we assume that all 579 thefts were violent in nature, that's still only 1412 violent crimes. In a city the size of San Francisco over that time period, wouldn't the "think of the children" lobby have us believe that the rate is much higher?
Most of these criminals aren't reselling these devices at pawn shops or on Craig's list either. GameStop has made it very easy to take any modern smartphone or tablet into their store fronts for cash. They then take these devices that they got on the cheap and send them out to rural communities and sell them for just a shade under retail. GameStop's uncaring jerk wad management strikes again.
When airplanes started to become more common, the number of crashes took off (no pun intended) simply because there were airplanes to crash.
The annual theft rate for automobiles was a perfect zero...until of course the automobile was invented.
It seems to me that accidents, crimes involving a particular technology, popular fashion item, etc. are naturally going to become a more significant portion of overall crime as they become popular. It reminds me of the sudden uptick in sneaker thefts when Air Jordans became popular.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Sorry, cell phone theft is not serious crime. Serious crime is genocide, murder, rape, molesting children, kidnapping, torture, etc.
Serious crime is what the carriers is charging us for data connections and SMS messaging.
It's obvious that people feel that they don't need to be alert to their surroundings. That is madness. This crime wave is basically the result of people making themselves easy targets. I know our world may shriek "blaming the victim", but you really ought to be on guard, it's your responsibility, it's your stuff, it's your life.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I can see the unfortunate implications of that now. 1. Get pulled over for going a couple of miles/kilometers over the speed limit. 2. Cop sees smartphone connected to car charger. 3. Under arrest for possession of a destructive device.
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
Was that driving while using a smartphone would soon be considered a violent crime across the U.S. Which, honestly, wouldn't be such a bad idea.
Homicides per 100,000 population by race:
- Whites = 0.7
- Hispanics = 27
- Blacks = 52
80% of the homicides attributed to "Whites" were actually committed by "Hispanics" who constitute 8% of our population.
http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Others/Others-Doc-Blacks/+Doc-Blacks-Crime&HateCrime/BlackVsWhiteCrimeStats-Christianparty.htm
Now shut up you scum.
As I write whenever the topic of smartphone muggings come up:
In the 70's, people were held up for their watch and cash (remember cash?). Different decade, different stuff.
There's no real excuse for punching someone or threatening them with violence when taking their smartphone.
If they are making a call while the rest of us are trying to watch the movie, I think this treatment should be mandatory.
I usually just wait till you put it down at your table, or stick it in a back pocket or pocket of your backpack or purse. No way I'm carrying a weapon, I don't need the extra time if I get caught (and I've never been caught). If some dude grabs my arm I just punch him in the face or kick him in the nads, sometimes I'll even throw the phone down on the ground but that's only happened to me twice. Carrying guns to rip smartphones is for losers. (I guess smartphones need smart thieves, like me ;-)
Even a properly blacklisted iPhone 5 is worth well over $200 for parts or for export into an area where blacklisting does not apply. To slow this type of violent crime the police and courts need to treat it more seriously. It is easy to spot an iPhone 5 and you would be hard pressed to find quickly an easier way to steal $200. Few used car radios or even flatscreen TVs are worth that on the hot market.
People who violently steal a cellphone should be put in jail the FIRST TIME for at least a year maybe more. In Maryland that is certainly not the case now. If you do not use a gun in the crime you probably won't go to jail even when caught with good evidence. The police also loath to investigate where a stolen phone is from GPS tracking information. They should do this at least in some conditions such as a well documented theft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Violent_crime_rates_by_gender_1973-2003.jpg never believe the hype.
NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER GIVE UP! "No limitations, no boundaries, there is no reason for them."
I just love how people who constantly complain about how buggy and unreliable everything is--and justifiably so, by and large--imagine that there's no way to activate a booby trap by mischance or hostility.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
(A) Already there today
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130413/16102322700/san-diego-cop-thinks-you-might-have-turned-your-cell-phone-into-gun-that-officer-safety-trumps-constitutional-rights.shtml
(B) I fully expected you to say that the biggest problem would be other people figuring out your code and sending it to your phone while you still had it.
With the proper inexpensive tracking tools, police could track down cell phones that have been stolen. This would lead them to people who probably have committed more than one crime as well.
God spoke to me
But it just works.
It works until you steal MY phone.
After that you will spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair.
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for lo I am the meanest SOB in the valley.
(common prison posting)
However, I've come up with an easy solution: Just rig the cellphones with explosives that can be detonated by sending the right message to it. That way, if somebody walks away with your iPhone, just blow him up.
I'm sure Iran, China, radical Muslims, or any number of bat shit crazy groups would love to see this happen. How long do you think it would take for this to get hacked? We should be able to reduce the population of most developed countries to 5 or 10% of what they currently are.
It looks like you have not only solved the cell phone theft problem. But also over population, pollution, green house gas emissions, traffic jams, etc. How efficient of you.
The ability to deny service to a blacklisted device already is part of the GSM standard and the central registry needed to get this working:
http://www.gsma.com/technicalprojects/fraud-security/imei-database
Now it is only a matter of getting the carriers to actually use this list to deny service. In most SGSN, all it takes is changing a config flag.
Yes, that hard!
Well, duh!
It is a device that costs $200 upwards, small and a lot of people are carrying. The amount of cash one holds is usually meager and credit/debit cards are worthless because they can be rendered useless with one phone-call (someone pointed out above that it would be a good idea to have that bricking option for phones too). Expensive watches would be a good alternative for theft, but youngsters don't wear them, since they have a smartphone to tell the time with. The smartphone is the new Rolex.
What took them so long for this database anyways? sheesh. It's not so much a serious crime as it is a crime. Smartphones nowadays can be used to manage your life with all the information you can set into it. Of course, for some, it's a great delivery system for Angry Birds and Temple Run... nevertheless, there should have been a DB a long time ago.
In the UK figures for crime be it property, cell phone or card fraud via http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2013/may/09/mobile-theft-card-fraud-property-crime are dropping and with not too many guns being used in the commissioning of these crimes you would think that we in the UK have it good but that is not so. It is the general fear of being a victim due to the fact that a good number of people have more than one mobile phone and this volume and value of goods that can be moved on for cash creates a pool of wealth awaiting a sometimes violent harvesting by others. One topic of notes is the different crime figures for mobile (cell) phone crimes when broken down by age and sex. All crime is serious if you or someone in your family is a victim.
Smartphones Driving Violent Crime Across US
Are they? Are they really? Or is it just quicker, easier, and more productive for a mugger to demand your phone instead of your wallet these days?
Or is there a whole generation of kids who would otherwise never have thought to turn to crime except that all those phones are soooo shiny...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
You might add that it has been reported that when Weev took out his cell phone at his trial after sentencing, someone yelled "He has his cell phone out" and immediately court security jumped on him to pin him to the ground.
Wired said about this, however, that
so the reports might be a bit exaggerated.
I thought Google was only driving cars.
www.gaiageek.com
Widely-published statistics make it clear: an explosive cell phone in your home is 85% more likely to harm a friend or family member than a criminal.
...to stick with my (antique?) flip phone.
Besides, a big slab of glass and plastic looks much less cool than the flipper when you want to call "beam me up, Scotty."
(Okay, granted, even the latter isn't cool anymore, but...)
-- Alastair
The modern world is complicated. You don't notice just how complicated it is because your brain is well-adapted to it. You are plenty intelligent enough to manage the level of complexity necessary for a prosperous middle-class life, so much so that you don't even realize just how much stuff you have to know and figure out in order to live well. You are beyond this level of complexity, and could probably handle even more.
However, there is a large segment of the population that are not so intelligent, and never will be. A combination of bad genetics and bad upbringing have limited their mental capacity. Long ago, when basically everyone was a farmer, this was not a problem...farming back then wasn't so complicated and pretty much anyone could handle it. But today it is a different story.
We have created, and are continuing to create, a world that makes flourishing (as opposed to barely surviving) too intellectually challenging for most people.
Those who get the short end of this stick do not think like you. They can't. They will never be able to make and run a successful business like you can, nor will they even be able to get a mental handle on what their legitimate options really are. They may attempt to work no-brain jobs, and the few of them that manage to keep such jobs will live a sub-poverty-level existence while surrounded by completely unobtainable symbols of wealth. Eventually, envy and frustration (or surprising desperate circumstances) will get the better of them and they will resort to the one thing they can figure out how to do: mugging you.
That is the reality, and posting career-counseling on blogs that are typically not even read by these people won't change that a bit.
Here is how this will play out, over the next several decades:
This problem will continue to get worse, resulting in more tax money spent on law enforcement, more of the maladjusts winding up in prisons (and there will be plenty, because we will build them). There, their needs will be completely met by your tax dollars, but they will be denied opportunities to breed, which is the only factor that will keep the problem from exploding into a bloody revolution.
Eventually, over the long haul, this self-selection will drive humanity as a whole to evolve more intelligence, which is a good thing. But the selection process is going to be expensive and is really going to suck for those who don't make the cut.
I had this happen to me. Individual demanded my phone and threatened me with a knife if I didn't give it to him. He changed his mind when I drew my glock instead. He did have the presence of mind to run rather than try anything though.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
How about an exploding dye pack. See someone looking like Carrot Top, call the cops.
I come here for the love
You have problems understanding relative badness. Blowing someone up for stealing a phone is a little much........
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I think most of us grew up learning in school that kicks, threats, and robbery aren't really taken seriously. Drugs, on the other hand
It might have been one of these: http://www.amazon.com/Guard-Dog-Security-Phone-Volts/dp/B003XI5RYK
This is not true. I read on the Guns are Better than Sex site that crime in Great Britain is going up because they don't have guns. Are you telling me that an American who enjoys fellating guns has lied? No way!
Suppose I own a museum and seek to make money by charging admission.
If seeing the museum has a certain importance to people - people must see the museum once in their lives, for instance - then I maximize my profit by raising prices as high as the situation will bear. To the limit that people need to see the museum, I can extract the most money.
Suppose instead the government fixes the museum ticket price but says nothing about how many people see the museum per day. Since I cannot raise prices I must sell more tickets to maximize profit. I am encouraged to structure operations so that the most people see the museum - opening the museum 24 hours a day, for instance. Over time I am encouraged to allow ever more people access to the museum - structural changes to the building or parking lot, touring the museum to large cities, and so on.
In the first case, economics based on a limited resource resulted in higher prices and less overall service.
In the second case, economics based on access resulted in more people having access.
In certain cases the government should regulate a fixed resource to maximize the usage or maximize the benefits to society instead of maximizing the individual profit. In the current telecommunications situation, we are not maximizing the utility of the resource as compared to other countries such as Europe and Japan.
We're seeing this in the healthcare industry as well. Health care is bewilderingly complex, but consider a slice of the issue for comparison: getting a diagnosis from a doctor's visit. If the government regulated doctor visits to a fixed price, and specified that future visits for the same ailment were covered under the original fee, then doctors would make the most money when they get the diagnosis right on the first visit. The economics would favor access, satisfaction, and customer service instead of "try this and see" with followup visits.
Sadly, the political structure in this country is thoroughly corrupt, so suggesting regulation is pointless. There are windmills for jousting in abundance, and life's too short to spend it on quixotic quests.
The cell phone companies have the ability to disable service for any phone permanently. They already do this in most of Europe and has almost eliminated cell phone thefts. The American companies resist doing this common sense action because they can still make money from stolen phones.
-- Will program for bandwidth
All smart phones need to be sold with a fire arm to protect it from theft.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The thief should just sign up a 2 year contract, then not pay for it.
Maybe just report your phone was stolen by Chechen rebels terrorists, DHS will find it in 5mins.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Those mad undesirables can go to battle, and become bullet catchers.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
A number of smartphone providers have been talking about adding fingerprint readers to phones to make the security stronger. Over 40% of serious crime involves smart devices and half of those crimes are violent in some way, many at knife-point. Does anyone else worry that it won't take long for muggers to work out that if they take the phone they need to take your index finger too?
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
In Europe, when a phone is reported stolen, it is deactivated. Their 'mobile' crime wave stopped when they did this. If such a scheme were adopted in the US, our 'crime wave' would stop too.
would smartphones be driving with violent crime in cars, so they can get to the other coast.
In NSA America social networks join you!
Nähhh, I'm pretty sure that you'll remain addicted and that it will sooner or later be your undoing.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
4. Cop pulls cell phone out of your car and starts writing up your citation.
5. Pull out backup cellphone, blow up cop, drive away. No ticket!
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
Doesn't have anything to do with skin color.
Unless you're trying to suggest if -I- were to do it, you'd not shoot at me?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Jackass, this is slashdot not 4chan.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I can't see myself feeling very comfortable with a electronically-detonated grenade in my pocket that was manufactured in China.
Chances are, either it won't go off when you need it - or it will go off in your pants.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I don't either. However, I do have a knife, a rifle, a good long head-breaking stick, and a fake sword that could at least break an arm.
I don't think it would work out so well for him.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
It would be nice to see if the last 10 years have continued that trend, or reversed it.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Don't worry folks, the manufacturers have this in hand. By next year the accepted minimum screen size for a flagship phone will be 17", and cellphone thefts will be rendered impractical because by the time your poor thief has backed up his pick-up truck and got his accomplices to help him heave your phone into the back, the cops will have arrived...
6. Massive manhunt to find you (and you were probably identified pretty quickly by your license plate being recorded by the cop's dash cam). Also, even if they don't call in a bomb squad before going anywhere near the phone, the cop would probably at least have you in handcuffs and search you first.
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
Manhunt? Hahahaha. Police are too busy arresting high school honor students making Drano bombs in empty fields to be bothered with petty criminals.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
So, you'd turn to crime because you didn't find a job?
Sounds like you're not as good and moral as you make out.