This honestly doesn't seem like a problem with organisational silos. The level of efficiency the author is suggesting is completely unnecessary. If the police had done some very basic police work, followed up the unauthorized transactions at each location for CCTV they would have gotten a very clear idea of who this person was. In fact hell, find out which phones pinged the phone tower near each of the locations at each of the relevant times and you almost certainly have exactly one suspect who'll match the CCTV and would be banged to rights.
With small crimes it's not that they can't be solved, it's that the UK has decided it would rather have some petty crime than to pay the taxes necessary to catch petty criminals (assuming that catching the criminal would even solve the crime problem). The current state of policing in the UK is that small thefts won't be investigated - so it doesn't matter how easy they are to solve.
Even given that, there are only so many police officers. Even assuming that it would take a person about 30 minutes of work to get an ID of the person, that's Yet Another Person in the system. The extra work goes through the entire chain of operations (can we automate away the court system too? Who is going to drive down to tell the criminal they need to show up?)
There is a checklist with hundreds of items that will appear if a person like this gets picked up. And a hell of a lot of work after that. This is the really dumb pragmatic argument to not being a police state (beyond the other arguments)
While I agree with most of what you've said, there is an issue of (a) what level of economic damage does this crime need to cause before it gets investigated—both for individual cases and for London overall (b) any efficiency gain would hopefully decrease the cost of investigation (in terms of hours spent), hence the assistance them with details (e.g. transactions) which they have completely ignored.
Except once they catch him they have to charge him and then prosecute him and then house him in prison and then release him with even worse prospects then he started with, so that he can go back to stealing.
I think that there is no economic gains, and there is no efficiency to be had in catching petty criminals. It is a symptom of a bigger social problem which needs to be dealt with .
Since when is law enforcement about money? Laws exists to ensure a reasonably ordered society and level playing field for everyone. There as to be an attempt at enforcement, even a half-hearted one, to ensure the genereal population follow and believe others follow the rules. Or you have vigilantes rising to deal with issues the police can’t bother with.
Unenforced laws are pointless and will be used at the discretion of the police to mess up someone’s day. That’s what gave use expressions like “driving while black”, “sitting while homeless”, and so on.
I’m not necessarily advocating for jailtime but maybe catching them and giving trade school as their sentence would be time and money well spent.
so where does the line between a crime being small enough not to warrant police attention and being big enough to warrant it get drawn? seems pretty arbitrary to me
>find out which phones pinged the phone tower near each of the locations at each of the relevant times
I don't know that that is actually possible. The police can access the records for any one number, but accessing all the records for a set of towers in a given time window is a different matter. I would actually love to know if this is within their capabilities.
It totally is within the capability of telcos. It's a database query away. Whether the police can get a warrant for it is a different matter. I'm not au fait with the details of RIPA post the EU decision [1][2] but it is safe to say the barriers are not that high. Meta data (like cell tower signal strength) is almost certainly available. Towers log everything, and location is a valued derived product.
You will never be able to justify the collateral intrusion that getting all the connections to a single cell site would represent.
If you don't know who you're looking for then it isn't actually that much help in any case.
Assuming you know that the suspect phone will have pinged a given cell site, then you still have to work out which phone it was. Assuming that they're not daft enough to use anything other than an unregistered PAYG sim, then you're left hoping that the IMEI of their handset has come to police attention.
If you had the resources, you could get the top-up data for all the unregistered sims attached to that cell site and hope there's CCTV at a given newsagent or that they've used their own bank account to top up online.
I'm not sure if you read the links? The UK doesn't have the same requirements as the US. They don't have a collateral intrusion limitation.
Once you have the IMEI of interest you can find everywhere it has been and every number dialled, and all DNS requests and IP transfers. You just need a dialled number which has a plan attached and you can look up the phone book entry from that persons phone (though police would need a warrant for that).
The only thing preventing the Met from finding this thief is a lack of person time.
Yes, there is a collateral intrusion limitation. You cannot simply go on a fishing trip.
Once you have an IMEI number that you can attribute to the suspect, having exhausted all conventional means of finding the data then you go ahead and start requesting billing and cell site data.
Note, however, that this won't tell you what ip addresses have been assigned to that account.
That's just it. There's already a frontend for the police to use that gives them access to all the data for a single phone number, sans warrant. Does that same frontend allow them to perform arbitrary queries across the entire dataset?. If not, then pursuing this lead would involve filling out forms and writing letters to telcos, possibly even obtaining warrants (unlike the usual process), and they probably wouldn't bother.
Incidentally, the ability to perform unrestricted arbitrary queries without a warrant across the entire phone-location dataset is a fairly horrifying amount of power for the police to have. But I suppose legally that ship has sailed with RIPA, and now it's just a question of the fine details of the implementation.
Getting a request approved is a nightmare. It's literally easier to get a search warrant from the courts than it is persuading police SPOCs to approve your RIPA request.
The gatekeeping is fearsome. They take their duties incredibly seriously.
I'm not quite sure what your 'no' is specifically in reference to. I'm also not sure what a SPOC is, and I'm not familiar with the details of the process.
But The Guardian reported in 2014 that "EE, Vodafone and Three give police mobile call records at click of a mouse", and in 2015 that "UK police requests to access phone calls or emails are granted 93% of the time", with rejection rates varying wildly by county from as high as 28% to as low as 0.1%. So it doesn't seem to be as hard as you're making out, unless things have changed wildly in the last few years. May I ask your sources?
The filtering isn't about civil liberties (although keeping councils out seems sensible) but rate limiting requests via paperwork, so only important ones get done.
>> it's that the UK has decided it would rather have some petty crime than to pay the taxes necessary to catch petty criminals
No such "active" decision has ever been taken by the UK citizens and simply never would be by any democracy I can imagine - and this is probably the next major problem democracy needs to solve.
Did you know the UK is self sufficient in strawberries? Supermarkets saw they had demand, and put strawberries on shelves from global suppliers year round, then started competing amoungst themselves on price which meant air freighted strawberries cost more than locally produced greenhoused food so we expanded our greenhouses - in a good stuff it's likely noone would vote for
I don't know quite how to solve this but I think a "backlog"
approach to democracy would work
The plastic ones take less damage from shipping, and people don’t seem to mind eating pretend strawberries, so that’s more of a free market failure thing.
In my experience, there are good ones to be had, but only if you buy locally and in-season. Imported or forced fruit are almost universally disappointing.
Or grow your own, using traditional varieties like Cambridge Favourite or Elsanta.
Sometimes I wonder if the motivation is to allow petty fraud as an outlet for crime, to keep the people who commit it from doing other less desirable things. Like a stealth welfare.
Not to be harsh on the OP, but let's compared the total £value of what was stolen vs the potential [opportunity] cost to the police and other relevant authorities which would be required to catch and convict the thief.
If the laptop had something the authorities valued, they'd work significantly harder.
One of the morals of the story is to never leave your wallet out of sight or out of feel when you’re in public spaces. Leaving your wallet in a back-pack and the back-pack in a corner of a restaurant/pub is asking for big trouble. In the very few cases when I have to leave my wallet unattended (like in a backpack at the side of a basketball court) I previously leave my bank cards and ID at home, I only bring some cash with me.
London is really bad for bag snatching. Never, ever leave your wallet, keys, phone or passport in your bag. Even when you’re holding the bag.
Don’t think for a moment that the theives aren’t watching you. Don’t think that you can just put your bag down while you look through a rack of clothes or leave it at your table while you order another drink from the bar. The theives are brazen, and as the article points out the millions of cameras that will watch it happen are not there to protect you.
This reminds me of a card skimmer I found on an ATM about 12 years ago (unfortunately, after I had used it to withdraw cash). I basically lucked into finding the camera hole and managed to rip the fake cover + video camera + transmitter from the frame of the ATM. With that in hand (unfortunately I dis not think to also take out the card reader itself), I called the police. While I was on the phone with them, a foreign couple tried to use the ATM. I told them not to, they pretended not to understand, I went back to my phone call with the police. When I turned around, the card reader was gone: that nice couple was the thieves, they were somewhere near (to catch the video footage of people entering their PIN) and swooped in to retrieve the card reader and the data stored in it.
The police squad that came around was fairly decent, but they didn’t really seem to be on the lookout for this type of crime; one of the cops confessed that he’d used the same ATM the night before and was genuinely impressed that I’d spotted it. Spending a couple of hours in the police station to give my statement (rather than going to the restaurant as initially planned) sucked, of course. I was shocked at how bad I was at describing the thieves, even though I’d seen them and talked to them.
Following up with the bank was similarly frustrating; the bank director told me he personally checked the ATM at opening and closing time, meaning the thieves installed and removed the card reader every night. I never found out if the other victims were made aware of the fact that their card details were stolen.
So, yes, thieves are brazen and smart; police are nice (sometimes) but helpless or just don’t care about these types of crime; and even though I did all I could to mitigate the situation, I still felt a bit shitty and helpless about the whole experience.
This was a smart but unsavvy approach to solving the problem. A better one would have been to appeal to people's better natures.
I think it can generally be said that bureaucracies mostly exist to serve other bureaucracies, mere mortals are illegible drains on their resources, to put it candidly, if they helped every sad sack with a sad story that showed up at their doorstep, pretty soon that's going to be all they're doing.
So instead you have to persuade, cajole people into helping you out. You find the one guy with both the spare time and the wherewithal to work the system. Spin a detective story out of it, make it interesting for them. Never lose sight of the fact that they're doing you a favor and send a nice thank-you card after its sorted.
Sure, political forces have driven wedges between institutions that should be public-facing and the public they should be serving. But that doesn't mean that good people don't still work there. You just have to get them interested. Anyone you speak to can be cajoled into doing the right thing. But they won't unless you help them see the light.
Nicely written article and I am sorry for what happened. Similar thing happened to a friend of mine some years ago and since then I don’t dare take my bag out during evenings.
Re The Met - it’s a sad state of affairs with policing in the UK. It comes down to the following: police only ‘care’ to investigate or deal with 3 types of criminals:
1. Terrorists
2. Paedophiles
3. Speeding motorists
If you wish to do any other criminality in the UK then you have pretty much free reign to carry out things with impunity. Government are even talking about abolishing jail sentences for ‘minor’ crimes (not to improve rehabilitation but to save money).
I am emigrating. I can see where things are heading and it’s not good for this country.
Serious question: are there any large (say >2,000,000) cities in western-style democracies (for example, Singapore is quite safe, but I think their system of government makes it a little easier to fight petty crime) in which the police really do take that stuff seriously? It makes me think of that scene in The Big Lebowski where he asks the cop if they have any leads on his car breakin.
I completely sympathize with this guy, and hope I don’t wind up in his situation, but how seriously does any big city resident truly expect the police to take relatively small-value nonviolent property crimes?
Anyone who has lived for any time in London knows that bag disappears. A lot. A coworker lost a week of work when his bag was snatched during the Friday pub drinks.
Mind your belongings. Police will not do anything about it.
The only thing this thief exploited is the idiocy of the victim, who carried around a backpack full of expensive items, his passport (leave it at home or in the hotel), and his wallet (put it in your pocket), and then left it piled in the corner. Of a bar.
We should all be glad that the police don't waste their time on petty crime like this. This guy didn't deserve this, but the rest of us shouldn't have to pay for his naivety.
Don't blame the victim. While it's true they could have been smarter with the reality of crime in the modern world, this crime is still 100% the fault of the robber.
You may be legally required to carry it with you. In China this is the case. (Or at least, China publishes a lot of documentation for foreigners claiming it is the case. I don't see why they'd be wrong about that.)
I don't carry my passport with me anyway, because that is crazy, but I don't like being placed in the wrong like that either.
Not in any way victim blaming but there is zero requirement to carry ID in the UK (except if you are young and want to get served for alcohol).
They tried to introduce national ID cards a few times and it got voted down each time.
FWIW I have no issue with a national ID card if it's purely that, Identification but the government couldn't leave it at that and wanted to tie the card to everything.
Turning a reasonable idea into a terrible idea.
Given the way they expand everything to compromise peoples privacy I don't trust them not to do it after the fact either so generally I'm on the no to national ID side.
Hooking it up to other Government systems such as tax, health, immigration, etc could be pretty useful. Currently each of the departments have to figure this out itself, and it is pretty messy from my understanding.
With an ID card, I probably shouldn't need a drivers license or a passport ( ignoring that some contries still stamp your passport, so this might not be achievable ). But I also probably shouldn't be required to carry on unless I'm trying to do something that requires one.
Once we've paid to solve the issue once, we shouldn't be paying over and over again. Next, once you have an identity, do you really want your bank or equifax to pay and build for the exact same thing? Sure they're private entities, but they're private entities that you can't avoid who pass the cost back to you, so why pay again?
On the other hand, this would likely make things like the porn pass easier to implement, so maybe we need to sort out the fact we're living in a nanny state first.
having been stopped by immigration people in several countries always have your papers on hand.
There is nothing less fun than being arrested, and going through processing (which takes FOREVER) to then talk to someone much later that'll take down details arrange cops to either pick it up for you (by ramsacking your room) or escort you there to pick it up (by ramsacking your room first).
If you are an immigrant in another country, also keep your papers on your person 24x7x365. All it takes is one jerk and bamm your how day or week just got ruined.
This fellow should follow the police's lead: it's petty crime that is unlikely to get resolved without an uneconomic expenditure of limited time and resources. What is he reasonably hoping to achieve?
Understandably he seems to be personally outraged by his experience, but if he put his emotions aside he'd put it down to experience, make an insurance claim, get his documents and cards reissued and move on.
Uneconomic when looking at this one single case perhaps -- probably not when looking at the thief's career though. Also, if there is no effort to stop small crimes, that seems to send a very bad signal...
The government has cut police budgets in real terms massively over the last decade or so.
Even if they wanted to current police forces simply lack the resources, they've (the gov) also juggled the crime stats so it looks like crime has stayed steady or declined (hence they can 'justify' the cuts).
The UK is in a complete shambles at the moment.
Years of unnecessary austerity combined with a government determined to privatise everything no matter what the actual (if any) benefit on ideological grounds has left it that way..but we keep voting for them and so we get the government we deserve* (*which we wouldn't have if we could get rid of our stupid first past the post voting system).
TLDR : thieves often get away with crime because resources are limited, and smarter thieves play into it.
However I hardly think that concerntrating power is a solution nor that this is really a problem that needs to be solved by finding he thieves.
I’d be curious to know by how much incidents of petty crime are reduced for every 1% increase in the wealth of the poorest 5%.
Meanwhile, I think the police are doing the right thing by focusing on organised and serious crime, and society would be doing the right thing if it focused on the causes of crime rather than on expanding the police force.
With small crimes it's not that they can't be solved, it's that the UK has decided it would rather have some petty crime than to pay the taxes necessary to catch petty criminals (assuming that catching the criminal would even solve the crime problem). The current state of policing in the UK is that small thefts won't be investigated - so it doesn't matter how easy they are to solve.