Although New York has traditionally been viewed as crime-ridden since the seediest days of the 1970s, the crime rate has actually been sinking for the last twenty years. No longer, however, and it looks like the desirability of Apple products are indirectly to blame.
According to Business Insider, grand larceny in 2012 was up 9 percent, and New York’s officials are attributing the rise to the theft of personal electronic devices like the iPhone.
If Apple thefts had not gone up in 2012, “we would be experiencing a slight decline in crime citywide,” the NYPD’s top spokesman Paul Browne told the Journal…
After the new iPhone went on sale in September, the NYPD put officers in 21 stores across the city to help consumers register their phones so cops could track them down if they were stolen, Bloomberg reported.
At the time, the NYPD noted that between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, more 11,447 Apple products had been stolen in the city – a 40 percent increase since the same period the prior year, Bloomberg reported.
This seems a little backwards to me, like blaming the television for being stolen, instead of the criminal who stole it or the police officer who wasn’t walking his beat when it was stolen. On the other hand, laying the responsibility for an increase in city-wide crime on the iPhone or iPad can only help people be more carefuly with theirs, and more aware of the danger they are in when they pull out their devices in strange neighborhoods.
Source: Business Insider
