#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

问题

Officials were asked to catch more phone thieves as street robberies of smartphones drove a citywide violent-crime spike

背景

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.

换别人会怎么做

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.

他们看到了什么

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.

那一手

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.

为什么管用

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.

值了多少

Within 18 months, phone robberies fell 27% in San Francisco, 16% in New York, and monthly thefts roughly halved in London.

什么时候会失灵

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.

后来呢

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.

资料来源

[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