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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.
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?
Already have everything needed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMEI And it is not trivial to change.
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?
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 witnessed one iPhone theft, a snatch and run from a bus. The owner set off after the thief but quickly returned to ask the bus driver (me!) to call the cops as the thief had a machete, and the phone owner very sensibly valued his skin more than the phone.
However, instead of just walking into the night before Security and the cops arrived, the thief went to the nearby train station. The security guards there, having been warned by my radio call, promptly apprehended the idiot and he's now doing time for assault with a deadly weapon. Oh, and for theft of an iPhone...
Think about the value of the stuff you carry around with you. If you're a man, maybe a nice watch, maybe some cash in your wallet (but less and less these days) and... your expensive smartphone. A woman might add some jewellery to that list, but probably not much day to day. So what else is a thief going to steal? Especially because there's less point in breaking and entering these days, since the old standbys of VCRs or DVD players are now worth almost nothing, and big-screen TVs are hernia producers!
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.
CDMA phones have a serial number.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
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."
(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.
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!
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 think most of us grew up learning in school that kicks, threats, and robbery aren't really taken seriously. Drugs, on the other hand
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.
On the other hand, so to speak, if you give a thief your fingerprint to unlock your phone when he steels it, he will have its use until it locks again. But if you teach the thief to reset this security feature with his own fingerprint, then it will be recorded in the system memory. And if the phone were traceable, then you could teach him a lesson for the rest of his life.
Note: I didn't intend to be sexist when writing this comment. On the off chance anyone feels left out, please feel free to switch the gender of the thief in the last sentence.