SF and NY officials to meet with leading smartphone makers to curb spike of thefts nationwide
SAN FRANCISCO — Top law enforcement officials from San Francisco and New York plan to meet with some of the nation's largest smartphone makers next week to help thwart the rise in cellphone thefts and robberies.
Context & Ripple Effects
The meeting is the escalation of a campaign that has been building for months: New York's mayor publicly blamed iPhone thieves for rising crime in December 2012, and San Francisco's district attorney already sat down privately with Apple in April 2013 to press for antitheft features. What changed now is scale and pressure — the two cities' top law enforcement officials are jointly confronting the makers together, and the story is being picked up wire-and-wide by Reuters, HuffPost, the Daily News and others.
The target of the meeting matters as much as the meeting itself. Prosecutors have argued that a kill switch or locked bootloader would make stolen phones worthless and collapse the resale market that drives the robberies; manufacturers and carriers have so far been reluctant to commit, which is why officials are moving from one-on-one talks to a public, multi-city showdown.
First-order effects
- Apple and Samsung face direct public pressure next week from George Gascón and Eric Schneiderman's offices to ship default antitheft technology, with their answers on the record rather than behind closed doors.
Second-order effects
- Carriers, whose replacement-phone and insurance businesses benefit from theft-driven upgrades, become the swing constituency — if they resist the feature, expect officials to widen the confrontation to them next.
Third-order effects
- If voluntary talks stall, the likely path is legislative: state-level mandates requiring antitheft switches in phones sold in that state, turning a law-enforcement request into a compliance requirement manufacturers cannot opt out of market by market.
The trend: Smartphone theft is shifting from a policing problem to a device-design mandate, as big-city prosecutors push hardware makers to build deterrence into the phone itself.