#1245 2013 · New York, San Francisco and London authorities (Secure Our Smartphones Initiative) · Consumer electronics / urban crime policy
Prosecutors couldn't arrest away iPhone theft, so they made stolen phones worthless
the problem
Officials were asked to catch more phone thieves as street robberies of smartphones drove a citywide violent-crime spike
background
By 2012-2013, smartphone theft — especially iPhones — was driving a measurable share of street robberies in New York, San Francisco and London. Police were making arrests, but the resale market for stolen phones, easily wiped and resold or exported with a new SIM, was large and liquid enough that theft kept paying regardless of how many individual thieves got caught. No realistic increase in policing could shrink a black market fed by that much daily petty theft.
In June 2013, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón and London's mayor launched the Secure Our Smartphones Initiative, which didn't ask for more police resources at all. Instead it publicly pressured Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft to build a remote 'kill switch' into every phone, letting an owner permanently disable a stolen device and wipe out its resale value the moment it went missing, rather than trying to intercept it after the theft.
what everyone would do
The standard response to a robbery spike was more policing: more officers, more prosecutions, more pressure on precincts for arrests, treating the wave of smartphone thefts as a law-enforcement capacity problem to be solved with more enforcement.
what they saw
Officials saw thieves weren't deterred by arrest risk, they were driven by resale value that survived any arrest rate. No feasible policing increase could shrink that market — but killing resale value could.
the move
The officials pressured manufacturers to add a free, remote kill switch to every smartphone, so a stolen phone could be permanently disabled by its owner and rendered worthless to resell, addressing the economic motive for the theft rather than trying to catch the thief afterward.
why it works
A remote kill switch means every phone theft risks producing an unsellable brick the moment the owner notices it's missing, which collapses the expected value of stealing a phone in the first place regardless of any individual thief's odds of getting caught. Because the fix devalued the stolen asset itself rather than trying to catch more people afterward, it reduced the crime at its economic root, and it scaled to every phone sold without needing a single additional officer.
the payoff
Within 18 months, phone robberies fell 27% in San Francisco, 16% in New York, and monthly thefts roughly halved in London.
where it breaks
It requires the stolen good's value to come primarily from resale rather than personal use or data access, and broad manufacturer adoption, since a kill switch on only some phones just shifts theft toward unprotected models. It also depends on owners actually activating the feature and reporting the theft promptly, and does nothing for theft motivated by harassment or data access rather than resale.
what came after
California and Minnesota passed laws in 2014-2015 mandating kill switches on phones sold in-state; the feature became a global smartphone standard through Apple's Activation Lock and Google's Factory Reset Protection, and is credited with a lasting multi-year decline in smartphone-related street robbery.
references
- [1]Smartphone kill switches credited with stifling theftPhys.org / Associated Press, 2015phys.org
- [2]The results are in: Smartphone kill switches decrease thefts by as much as 50 percentDigital Trends, 2015digitaltrends.com