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'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
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 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.
https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/epz9nm/colorado-grandma-...
But my Amex automatically covers any lost or stolen phone up to $800 as long as I pay the monthly bill with the card.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
So there's really no point in even coming over.
Small town where you know the cops by name? Sure.
Incompetently ran large cities with adversary relationship with corrupt civil service? Maybe not.
They'll lean on the door, bang on the hinges, make you think they're going to break it down.
But as long as they stay outside your door, and it's not reeking of weed or something, just refuse to open.
For now, they're trying to overturn this constitutional protection due to gang violence lately.
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.
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…
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.
You'd rather have someone steal your phone than jaywalk in front of you and force you to slow down?
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?
Free to you, maybe. But someone has to pay for it.
> Do people actually value a replaceable object more than lives that can never be replaced??
No. This is why we all agree that murder and manslaughter are worse crimes than phone theft. But jaywalking is not murder or manslaughter.
To be clear, does "it" mean "jaywalking" there?
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).
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).
> The police weren't even interested in the video.
Why would the police want to see a video if no crime has taken place? What did you expect the police to do?
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.
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).
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.
I can't talk about Scotland, Wales, or NI. But here's the data for England:
https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/sta...
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).
The CQC also have their "Monitoring use of the Mental Health Act" report here: https://www.cqc.org.uk/publications/monitoring-mental-health...
This strengthens the point you're making. EG https://www.cqc.org.uk/publications/monitoring-mental-health... and https://www.cqc.org.uk/publications/monitoring-mental-health... both talking about the poor care recieved by patients as a result of the defunding of the NHS and social care systems.
Yes, this could end up being a fine of $10,000 for stealing a $150 phone, but there is an argument to be made that it is justified (and just).
What are the arguments against?
>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."...
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.
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?
https://news.northeastern.edu/2019/05/15/northeastern-univer...
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-broken-win...
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/revis...
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/broken-windo...
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 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.
https://kaltura.uga.edu/media/t/1_958u30nt/86446941
It’s not as bad now as people have migrated in from the north and the county as grown. But those folks are still there.
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.
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.
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.
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.