Criminals Love Stealing iPhones In New York City
November 20, 2013
In 2012, nearly 20 percent of all burglaries, robberies, and grand larcenies in New York City involved Apple products. This statistic comes from the New York Police Department (NYPD), as recently explained by Fox 5 News.
Take a look:
New York News
According to the report, 16,000 Apple items were stolen last year because they have a high resell value. That accounts for 14 percent of all the crime in the city. Bob Strang, a former FBI and DEA agent, explains that Apple thefts are not petty crimes. Instead, “criminals have a network.”
In a move that could help bring crime levels down, the New York City Council is currently debating a measure that would force pawn shops and resellers to share their inventory with police through a digital database. There has been no word on when the measure could be put to a vote.
In December 2012, Mayor Michael Bloomberg blamed rising crime rates on the theft of Apple products. As the mayor's press secretary said at the time, "If you just took away the jump in Apple, we’d be down for the year."
In May of this year, The New York Times published a bizarre story, entitled "Cellphone Thefts Grow, but the Industry Looks the Other Way." In the piece, the Gray Lady seems to blame Apple for the increase in crime.
This year, Apple added a new Activation Lock feature in iOS 7. The feature is designed to make it more difficult for thieves to use a stolen iOS device. With Activation Lock, if a thief tries to turn off Find My iPhone or if the device is totally wiped, they’ll have to know the specific Apple ID username and password to reactivate it.
Who do you feel is to blame for New York's increase in crime?
