The enduring popularity of street crime

The article in The Economist from which the headline is borrowed was on my mind today, a few moments after I became a street crime statistic myself. A classic smash-grab-run, it was over quickly. Daylight, walking through the park, talking to my sister, other people on their way home from work. Then two tall guys, a few punches, sprinting away with my mobile phone.
    Some helpful people called the police who appeared in two cars within a few minutes and broadcast the vague description we were able to give of the muggers. Later, the mandatory call to the phone company to block the SIM card and the phone.
    But if the phone is blocked from working with any SIM card, as the phone company assured me, what is the value of the device to my assailants unless they are design students? My guess is that the ease with which you can get your phone unleashed from the tie-in used by many phone companies to prevent you signing on with a competing service also works for stolen phones.
    Is there a market for better algorithms to protect wearable devices like phones, music players and cameras? Or are those algorithms inexorably linked to service provider tie-in and DRM shunned by consumers?
    Technology should be one of the weapons we use to fight crime, especially when attractive technology is a contributing factor of crime. (This year, 100,000 people in the UK will get mugged because of their mobile phone.) Better locking, tracking or clever use of the in-built camera to transmit photos of who is handling the phone ("this phone is equipped with MugShot™"). But maybe solutions can be more creative as well: Top of the line phones that are indistinguishable from cheap ones, unattractive colours or personalisation to such a degree that the phone is a pain to use for others?
    Leave a comment if you want to share your opinion. Don't call me just yet.

Comments

[Simon Barratt]

Sorry to hear about your hassles, hope there were not too many bruises!

If the phone can't be killed for sure, then why bother saying it is unusable? Is there value in just using it for a few hours after the crime? Can the perp, use it for more than just phone calls?

I like your camera idea! I came across a product for the Mac that does this - http://orbicule.com/undercover/

It doesn't seem beyond belief that this type of functionality could be added to phones:
* location tracking (GPS or closet cell tower?)
* remote grab of photos from the phone by carrier
* sms messages to the device informing the current holder that they are using a stolen device which is being tracked.

On a more positive note, I recently had the reverse happen to me (no I did not mug any one!) - http://apps.fmc.com/Blog.nsf/dx/faith-in-people.htm

Chin up, all the best.

[Ed Kohler]

I like this idea too. Making something unusable drops the value to nothing.

The phone could be located by police triangulating the signal it sends. The only problem is they likely won't invest resources in recovering the device.