Crime Is Up and Bloomberg Blames iPhone Thieves
Hold onto your iPhones! — Crime in New York City inched up this year, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Friday fingered the culprit: too many iPhones and iPads were being swiped. — A rise in thefts of shiny Apple products accounted …
Context & Ripple Effects
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has handed Apple an unwanted distinction: the company's devices are now named as a driver of New York City's overall crime numbers, which inched up in 2012 after years of decline. The timing tracks with Apple's position in the market — relationships data from days earlier put its U.S. smartphone sales share at a record 53.3%, meaning the most-coveted pocket computer is also the most-stolen object on the street.
The iPhone-as-crime-object story is not new to this beat: back in 2007, Wired reported that the iPhone was tantalizing and frustrating criminal forensics experts, and the device has been a theft magnet ever since. What changed with Bloomberg's Friday statement is that a mayor is now publicly folding gadget theft into headline crime statistics — a framing that traveled fast, picked up the same day by the Los Angeles Times, CNET, The Verge, GigaOM, MacRumors, TUAW, 9to5Mac and ValueWalk.
First-order effects
- NYPD attention and patrol priorities tilt toward electronics theft, since stolen iPhones and iPads are now officially counted among the causes of the city's rising crime rate rather than treated as petty larceny.
- Apple faces reputational exposure: the most popular smartphone in America (53.3% share per December 2012 sales data) is being publicly identified as the loot of choice, tying its brand to a civic problem.
Second-order effects
- Pressure builds on Apple, Google and the carriers to ship stronger anti-theft defaults — remote lock and wipe — because city halls that blame devices for crime stats will look to the manufacturers for fixes.
- Other dense cities with high iPhone penetration face the same statistical distortion, giving prosecutors and police chiefs elsewhere a ready-made template for attributing crime upticks to device theft.
Third-order effects
- If mayors keep pressing, device-level security stops being a feature and becomes a public-safety expectation, with the possibility of coordinated city-by-city demands on smartphone makers — a path the San Francisco and New York officials' planned sit-down with manufacturers points toward.
- Crime statistics themselves get reinterpreted through hardware: a single product category's resale value becomes material enough to bend a city's crime curve, complicating how declines and upticks are credited or blamed.
The trend: As smartphones concentrate more personal and resale value in one pocketable object, municipal crime statistics and device makers' security decisions are converging into a single policy fight.