What I find incredible is that despite having precise location coordinates the police did not recover it. I think we underestimate the extent to which not capturing petty thieves influences people's trust in "the system" in general.
I've had two things stolen from me recovered and both times it was part of a larger sting operation.
I'd imagine if the police followed this phone they'd find hundreds of phones and other stolen goods at the location.
That's the exploit the criminals are working from: do the unenforced petty crime repeatedly as an occupation.
It's probably More profitable for reducing crime to hunt those people down because they're doing it operationally whereas some perpetrator of a crime of passion isn't doing it multiple hours every night.
Also, I'm not actually advocating for locking those people up so much as getting them on the right track. That kind of initiative and organization is admirable, just stop robbing people with it
Totally agree. This is the essence of the 'broken windows' approach to crime prevention. Anecdotally (I live in north london) a large proportion of burglaries are committed by a small number of individuals, and in fact when a single gang were eventually apprehended a few years back it put an end to a serious spate of break-ins. When a mate was burgled in his area some years before that, the police found the perpetrator but did not pursue to prosecution as there was a sudden reprioritisation to anti-terrorist work. There is a disconnect between police priorities and the helplessness ordinary people feel when crimes that violate their homes and sense of security are not taken seriously.
For the record both times were auto theft. One was in Davis CA and the other was in Los Angeles CA.
I never got a full story other than it was some larger operation where plenty of other things were recovered.
I think if you walked into a police station and said you had something stolen when very reliable tracking information and was able to convince a detective, they'd likely be very interested. By as cynical as you want but things like that are exactly why they took the job.
I'm pretty sympathetic to the defund movement but catching occupational criminals sounds pretty much exactly what I think the police should be doing
I had an iPhone 4 stolen that I left at the gym that I was working at as a part time fitness instructor.
I found the location of my phone with the then new feature. I called the police. They met me at the house where the phone was located. The person who lived at the house said he didn’t take it. The police couldn’t do anything.
The catch is, the guy was telling the truth.
The next morning, I looked up the owner of the house next door where the phone now reported it was. I called the owner who said it was a rental. He asked his tenants did they steal the phone. They denied it too. They were also telling the truth. But they did tell me that their neighbor actually worked at the YMCA where I left it.
I called the manager at the YMCA and he had the person bring the phone back.
So the moral of the story is that I falsely suspected two people of stealing my phone based on its location.
The police in the UK don't see FindMy info as sufficiently precise for a search warrant.
There's enough news stories about American police raiding the wrong address based on FindMy that the UK justice system simply refuses to see it as sufficient evidence.
Which is partly why phone thieves in the UK get to operate with near impunity.
12 years ago, when I just arrived in UK and was renting a room in a house, one day in the morning we got woken up by banging on the doors by police looking for one of our housemates. They kept asking him where is the phone, he showed them all phones he had but they were not the phone they were looking for.
He was a door security in one of the clubs in central London and apparently a police officer lost their phone in that club last night and gps did point at our address so they assumed he stole it. They kept searching the whole house, including my room until they finally found the lost phone in another room. Another flatmate went to that club that night for a party together with security guy. Strangely after they found the phone they kept searching.
In the end they finally told us they were not really looking for a phone but for a police badge that was lost together with the phone. The guy said he found only phone, I think he was laying but that is not part of the story.
Point is, they have ability if they have motivation. Took them only few hours since party was over to come knocking, 7 officers, and do the search.
I guess the security guy living in the area where GPS was pointing could be considered extra evidence but surly if with enough phones stolen and clear pattern of them going to the same area they could collect enough evidence.
I think, they don't do it for each phone because they don't have resources and these are low priority not because they can't do it.
A lost warrant card (the police badge in question) is a pretty huge deal apparently.
You are correct though that stolen phones are deemed low priority, the term used for it is "volume crime".
"Why don't the police use findmy" comes up nearly weekly on the /r/policeuk subreddit. Same answer every time - too inaccurate for a warrant, not enough priority to put the work in to develop further evidence to pursue a warrant.
I wonder if the lock screen could take a picture of the person trying to unlock - maybe only turned on when "find my" phone is activated. Could that be enough grounds for a search warrant?
Apple ought to be able to determine these concentrations/pathways of known-stolen phones with a query to whatever database backs Find My.
The query may be easy for the most-egregious operators.
It may be in Apple's interest to look for them, too. "Don't steal Apple phones. A trillion dollar company will pay a data scientist to bust you at scale."
Find My doesn’t leak device location to Apple, so they do not have this data. (iirc it works something like this: the device includes a public key in its broadcasts and nearby devices encrypt their location for that key and send that blob to iCloud)
I can go to iCloud.com in a browser and ping my phone’s location. They may not be initiating these pings or storing the data, but it’s well within their capacity.
You could also voluntarily share the device location with Apple and friends as part of reporting it stolen. I don’t really care if Apple knows where my stolen phone is after it’s stolen.
I can only speak for Swedish police and the current legal situation but if they had a location on my apartment building for example, it would not help them.
My two buildings have over 128 households. And even if they got a fix on one gate, that's 16 households. And the law says you cannot enter anyones home without a court order here.
What about coming into the building/complex (but not the apartment), going near the GPS location, then using something like Bluetooth or WiFi to detect proximity to the device to figure out what to search?
Once a criminal, always a criminal. I don't understand while we allow criminals back into society; if someone chose to commit a crime once, there's no reason to think they won't apply that same calculus again and again.
Are you being serious? I can’t tell but I can’t imagine why you would be serious. People getting out of prison have a huge stigma from people thinking this way and it makes reintegrations much harder than it should be.
Anyway, most people are criminals just waiting to get caught. Most people speed, jay walk, go through red lights at least once in their life, unintentionally lie on tax forms, forget to declare things at customs, etc. You’re probably a criminal, the odds are not in your favor… so, if you are serious, you should take a look in the mirror.
> Most people speed, jay walk, go through red lights at least once in their life, unintentionally lie on tax forms, forget to declare things at customs, etc.
None of those things are nearly as bad as large-scale phone theft. And contrast the words "unintentionally" and "forget" with intentionally stealing property that you know belongs to someone else.
Personally, I’d rather hire an ex-con who said they were desperate than someone who did it “accidentally” (I.e. a kleptomaniac whose only treatment was a prison cell. Yes, that’s an actual mental illness.) but most people speed on purpose, jay walk on purpose, run stop signs… on purpose. These crimes actually put people’s lives at risk and steals literal time from people’s lives! That’s surely worse than stealing lumps of metal, glass and plastic that can be easily repurchased at nearby stores throughout the world?
Anyway, there is only one crime that usually cares whether you do it on purpose or not. That’s murder. Virtually ever other crime doesn’t care whether it is on purpose or by accident. It’s not like when you pull someone’s criminal background, it says: jaywalked by accident. You either do the crime, or not. Most people on this planet perform crimes habitually and on purpose (sometimes without even the knowledge that they did a crime!). It doesn’t matter. Most people are criminals…
> but most people speed on purpose, jay walk on purpose, run stop signs… on purpose. These crimes actually put people’s lives at risk and steals literal time from people’s lives! That’s surely worse than stealing lumps of metal, glass and plastic that can be easily repurchased at nearby stores throughout the world?
You'd rather have someone steal your phone than jaywalk in front of you and force you to slow down?
Replacing my phone with a police report is basically free and minimal hassle. Restoring from a backup is painless.
But putting the life of myself, my passengers, and the idiot walking in front of my moving vehicle at risk?? Do people actually value a replaceable object more than lives that can never be replaced?? Is that a thing?
I’m fairly certain it does not. I dated a parole officer in my 20’s where I heard all kinds of things about ex-cons that I never knew about. They have a hard life because of people like you when all they (usually) want to do is get back to a normal life after fucking things up.
One thing I find really interesting about the country I’m currently living in is that nothing you get arrested for will show up on a background check unless it is specifically related to the job you’re applying for. Thus theft will show up for retail, but not for writing software or secretarial jobs. I wish the US did something like that so people could have a fresh start in a new career.
Police are like a help desk, you need some juice to get escalated to someone who is empowered or gives a shit.
The patrolman is there to take a report.
In a case affecting me, a guy was stealing low value items from my porch every week. Solution: i got the surveillance video on TV and it caught the eye of a detective lieutenant who knew the guy.
The easiest path to this sort of thing is to know cops and phone a friend. Otherwise, 500 people were grifted that day… nobody cares.
This is because the police in the system are, largely, more worried about going after crimes for larger numbers/institutions. IE: A city walmart will stage police, and pay for them.
A police organization will focus on whatever channel the support comes from.
In addition to being largely built on the idea of escalation instead of compassion.
Look at the use of the word “petty” - to the person who’s entire life is on that phone it is not petty at all.
Police is not interested in petty crime.
(A thief in this story was likely connected to a vast "organized crime" network, but try to prove this to the police when you are filling the report and they see just another stolen iPhone).
The phone will be sold for pennies on the dollar to an immigrant owned repair store that doesn’t ask any questions and then will go to a local sketchy wholesaler and then will go to one of about 15 or so companies in Dubai, Hong Kong or Shenzhen (for example https://www.hanggroup.com/price/https://www.lcdone.com/https://www.actionlogistics.com/). A coordinated effort to shut down these companies could probably make phone thefts decline dramatically for at least a couple of months.
> What I find incredible is that despite having precise location coordinates the police did not recover it.
I'm not sure how precise they really are, for the purpose of recovery anyway.
One day, the police knocked on my door while I was staying at a hotel. They were looking for a just-lost iPad, and the "Find-My" feature put it right by my room.
Problem is, the room was in a multi-story structure, and the pin, when I looked at it, was in the middle of the hotel (any so was my room).
Police here are known for not pursing such crimes. I reported an attempted property theft to my local police, having caught the perps on my security camera. The police weren't even interested in the video.
I guess if someone tries to shoot me in the head point blank, but the cartridge fails to fire and the perpetrator runs away, then everything is fine, since no crime was committed in the end.
You will surely see some people here saying that the broken windows theory has been debunked (I used to be one of them), so that's why I did not use that phrase, but at the very least I don't think the equation for pursuing the thieves is "the phone is worth 1000 quid, the investigation is 2000, therefore it's not worth it". I think we are too heavily discounting people's lost trust in Police effectiveness that happens because of stories like that.
Reminds me of listening to an engineer justify removing a $5 protection IC (after component-shortage inflation) as the thing it was protecting was $3.
No, if that $3 part takes an ESD discharge, the entire $1000+ assembly is now (as far as the customer is concerned) scrap and needs to be RMA'd and replaced or repaired at our expense and the customer will, quite correctly, think it's unreliable junk from now on.
Even if it was just a $5 part protecting only a $3 part, it still makes sense to keep it. The logistics of returns and customer support for even a small percentage of returns would potentially be worth it.
That would need careful cost-benefit analysis. My instinct is to keep the protection or find a way to retrofit cheaper/available parts too maintain it. But then I'm not in the cheap and shonky consumer tat business.
Sure, the investigation is worth more than a single phone, but you're pretty likely to find 50 phones.
You're very, very unlikely to be robbed by someone who's doing it for the first and only time in their life. Most likely, you'll come across a gang of organized criminals, which you can now put in jail, and recover value worth tens of thousands of pounds, return it back to their owners, restore faith in "the system", and possibly uproot a major crime operation.
It's such a massive fucking win I don't understand why they don't enforce it more.
Pull a few officers of Twitter duty, and maybe do some real police work?
The cost of handling an order of magnitude more cases is significantly expanding the service. Everyone wants excellent public police, health care or education when it affects themselves. But going from average to good to excellent public services take more and more effort. Few countries today are willing to have the long-term public commitment and taxes to make that a reality.
The issue in the UK is that the Police suffers from scope creep. The UK police force has been criticized for expanding its scope to include enforcing anti-hate crime laws and investigating "non-crime hate incidents." (hard to believe that the country that gave us Orwell came up with that phrase). This has diverted resources from more important tasks and led to the allocation of time and money towards activities such as painting their cars in rainbows and raising pride flags in public ceremonies.
Whatever you think of those side-activities, I'm sure fewer people would have any problem with them if they were confident that their possessions would be recovered if stolen (and more important crimes prosecuted).
>The issue in the UK is that the Police suffers from scope creep. The UK police force has been criticized for expanding its scope to include enforcing anti-hate crime laws and investigating "non-crime hate incidents."...
This ^^ People get frustrated with the fact that they report a robbery or a break-in and the police take no action. But then they read about court cases involving 'hate crimes' which consisted of nothing more than someone being called a name they found offensive, or a dog being taught to do a nazi salute.
Obviously these cases are rare [that's why they make headlines], But the fact they happen at all doesn't do the police's reputation any favours, when there are 'actual' crimes being effectively ignored through claimed lack of resources.
None of the things you are complaining about have much of an operational impact on the British police.
You know what does?
The wholesale destruction of the NHS and ambulance services leading to the police being the first response to mental health issues.
Police are the wrong agency to deal with this, but currently in the UK, the police are pretty much always the first (often only) to deal with MH issues and get people into care/section them etc.
There were 34,000 detentions under the act. Of these, only 4,150 were detentions following a Section 135 / 136 place of safety order (the bit of the Mental Health Act that the police can use).
There is no way to recover stolen possessions with a high degree of confidence as there are countless of those types of incidents all the time every day. Most police forces already have less resources than they could use for the more serious cases. Reliably handling lesser serious cases that are even more plentiful would be a large increase in activities and even larger increase in effort. And since a large part of the cost of public services are salaries it would mean a noticeable tax increase. Probably for a long time. Other than that what you are asking isn't really possible.
Somehow the priorities seem to be misplaced. On the London public transport, you're reminded every 3 minutes that you should report "unusual" behaviour to the police, including unwanted staring ("Call 61016 - See it, say it, sorted."), yet they're unable/unwilling to track down a stolen item worth ~£1200 even with accurate GPS coordinates available.
There's two things. Maybe it doesn't prevent further crime as well as targeted saturation does, but it sure is nice when the police show up when they are called. Most research focuses on the first but the second is what GP was referring to.
Yes I’m sure if the police used “targeted saturation” in my neighborhood where in the entire county it’s only 3% Black, neither me or more likely my 6 foot 5 20 year old step son would be targeted for “looking suspicious”.
For reference, it’s the most affluent county in GA (not saying much in the grand scheme of things) and I work remotely at $BigTech. So while I make over twice the median household income for the area, we still get looked at suspiciously.
I hear you, and that sucks. Targeted saturation is exactly that IF you live in an area with lots of crime: they look for areas where crime concentrates and do lots of extra stops and extra police presence. If you don't live in an area with lots of crime, it's not targeted and they're doing something else, probably not constructive.
Rather than allowing nerd academics sitting in ivory towers to control our conversation look outside. Have you lived in a city with high crime rates? I have and my friends/family yearn for the return of days to policing neighbourhoods.
Have you been a minority living in a neighborhood where “you don’t look like you belong”?
I had a house built in the most affluent county in the metro area and I make over twice the median income of the area - in GA - thanks to the fact that I work remotely for $BigTech.
My family constantly were looked at suspiciously. The county was an infamous “sun down town” as late as the 80s.
The work the police do has almost nothing to do with "having a general location of a crime." In a boring, trivial sense there is probably always a crime of some sort being committed in every large apartment building. In general, unless the stolen item is unique or special in some way, going in "to get it" will almost always be the most expensive option. People could be hurt, the police could get the wrong person, the item could be damaged, etc. Also you would probably not get your phone back! It would be evidence of a crime and in custody for a long time.
I have a lot of critiques of the police, but I really don't think we have put them in a good position to retrieve stolen property AND I think trying to retrieve stolen property is generally a really inefficient way to make victims of crime whole.
Isn't getting the phones back only the secondary goal? Isn't the more important thing to put the thieves behind bars so that they can't steal any more phones?
>I think we underestimate the extent to which not capturing petty thieves influences people's trust in "the system" in general.
The biggest reason I've stopped voting for democrats is because of this. If you ever experience being the victim of a crime in a city/state run by democrats it's a slap in the face how little the police care. Hit and run? "Submit a report online." Have a meth-head living in your garage and they're screaming violently for hours? "Call the non-emergency line--it's not illegal to be crazy." This can't be a effective way to run a city, but in California it's the norm.
How not? You’re claiming that the reason people don’t trust the police is because they don’t go after petty crime - not because there is a history of corruption, targeting minorities, abusing power, and coverups
This is a manifestation of the “broken windows” theory of policing, championed by Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor of NYC. The theory was that cracking down on minor crimes like vandalism, jaywalking, and the squeegee guys, more serious crime would be reduced. It was ludicrous as stated, of course, and has been debunked.
But its real value was reassuring middle class voters that “something was being done: — after all they could see it!
It also meant a crackdown on the lowest level drug dealers and harassing young black men just minding their own business. This was largely invisible to most of the aforesaid middle class voters, but allowed cops to report great crime statistics without havinto take any risk by going after the real criminals.
* not to be confused with the “broken windows fallacy” in economics.
Not true. What was done in the 1990s was very different than what it evolved to later, mostly after Giuliani.
Like any metric driven process you need to be careful with the metrics. After awhile the compstat system became part of the internal political machinery of NYPD. It was a means to reward friends and punish rivals. People got stuck in the middle.
So the equivalent of mid-level directors at NYPD did what people do - cooked the books. If they were expected to yield a 20% increase in citations, they’d find some bullshit way to get them. If they needed to reduce rapes, they would charge assaults.
This happened because of poor governance and that the people who pioneered statistics driven policing were from the transit police and were able to overstep the normal bureaucracy.
The incompetence of leadership and fostering of a toxic culture is continuing with the knee jerk responses. We’re ignoring crime and fostering a broken culture in the police forces nationally.
They can't, because ehm... . So you can't arrest these people in UK.
Also weapons are banned there, so can't even defend yourself.
Just lay on the ground and let yourself to be mugged. UK logic is funny.
