Crime and the Smartphone

Courtesy of Apple.

On Monday, an intern for the Mountain View tech firm, Covia Labs, stepped out onto a San Francisco street, fiddling with an iPhone. Moments later, a passing bicyclist snatched the phone from her hands, and raced off.

Since then, the blogosphere (including us here at KALW News) has been giggling at the thief’s foolishness. It turns out the intern was in the midst of demonstrating new software created by the company--specifically, a GPS phone-tracking application--and as she walked down the street, her boss was back at the company’s PR firm, watching her movements (or rather, those of her phone) in real time on a google map. Needless to say, the police were called, and the apparent thief was caught in about 10 minutes.

I’m not going to go cynical here and wonder at the fact that the clashing of fates that inspired this media wave occurred on the steps of Covia Lab’s PR firm. (Ok, I just did, but now I’m moving on.) Instead, let’s talk about how very many crime stories these days tend to feature smart phones, cell phones, and civilian technology in general.

This isn’t the first time an iPhone has saved itself from usurpation. The first story I remember hearing like this one was back in January, when a friend of a friend posted his elaborate, somewhat manic quest to find a man who was seated next to him on an airplane and allegedly pick-pocketed his iPhone. Using MobileMe and Google’s Street View, the unhappy flier tracked his phone from Daniel's Taco Stand in LA, to Lodi, tracing the calls being made from the phone all the while. He finally racked up enough information about the apparent thief and made enough accusatory calls to his family members to get the guy to return his phone to him by overnight mail.

Just yesterday there was a story from the Twin Cities where an iPod and Facebook helped avert an apparent attempted rape. The Pioneer Press tells a tale of a 12-year-old girl, left home alone with her mother’s ex-boyfriend. The ex allegedly took away the girl’s cell phone, made her leave her bedroom door open, and then alledgedly appeared naked by her bed late at night. Apparently, the girl fought him off, pushed a dresser against her door, and in the absence of a phone, used her iPod to log onto Facebook and got a message to her friend to tell her mother to come home.

Though the Twin Cities story is more disconcerting than anything else, there’s something incredibly compelling about the idea of user-generated justice--something more satisfying even than hearing about a traditional arrest and conviction. And I think that satisfaction comes down to something we don’t usually focus on in crime stories: empowerment.

Talking to a number of people who’ve been victimized by crime over the years (and their families, for those who passed away) there seems to often be a lingering sense of violation, of feeling insecure or lack of control in the world. Every person is different, and everyone responds to being victimized differently, and I know that many police and prosecutors make a great effort to include family members in the search for and trial of a perpetrator. But many, many people seem to come out of the process feeling less than content; feeling like they haven’t quite gotten justice for what’s been done to them.

Perhaps this is an inevitable byproduct of professionalizing justice--the necessary, but small price to pay for moving beyond the eye-for-an-eye, vigilante-style anarchy of yore (or what some would say is the revenge culture of modern-day inner cities). And I can’t help wondering if we’ll see a counter-story to these technological thief-foils one of these days: a person who jumps to an assumption about a lost phone, or turns their quest violent. But stories like these scratch an itch that traditional arrests and convictions generally don’t--and they remind us that there’s a great need to find ways to empower victims within the confines of the criminal justice system.