Originally published at: Watch as subway passengers unite to recover stolen phone from peevish fruit eater | Boing Boing
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i hear they handle thefts quite differently in mexico
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Scenarios like this are quite frustrating, because pickpockets and thieves often take advantage of the lack of police, and devise so many schemes to get around being held to account, though this man’s logic (If I had your phone I wouldn’t be here on the train) leaves much to be desired.
Gentleman Thief, if the cops grab you and put you in holding for 24 hours, that inconvenience is fair payback for what you did to me, especially when they find my phone in your pocket. 
I’m going to posit that there’s a certain kind of logic in shoplifting or theft of major chain stores and industries, which have been extracting wealth from communities for decades, while theft against individuals is much harder to justify because the thief has no insight into the victim’s situation and no personal animus against them.
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Technically, that would be a noife.
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Un couteau.
TBH, whilst I recognise why, I’m disappointed nobody grabbed him, performed a citizen’s arrest and punched the emergency button on the platform. And the moment that he struggled a handful of people didn’t pile in to sit on him.
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Unfortunately all it takes is one over aggressive former military type and the thief, though guilty, is dead. This is how a similar scenario played out on a New York subway a few months ago:
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What a distinctive artifact of 21st Century London.
It would be interesting to know if statistics on property crime suggest any sort of culturally influenced targeting; or if the practice suggests more or less pure opportunism.
There’s probably some overlap by default; given that being an effective plunderer is one way to have enough money to be worth stealing from; but it would be interesting to know if there are any correlations to be found in the broader data between victimization rates and measures that could be proxies for extractiveness or perceived extractiveness.
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By ‘culturally influenced targeting’ I had in mind deviations from a pure ‘go where the money is and the risk isn’t’ baseline created by the perception of extractiveness you describe: eg. does shoplifting data actually suggest that people would rather go after a chain than a locally owned operation, all else being equal? Are people more interested in pickpocketing tourists in places where those are perceived to be in destructive excess rather than merely common, that sort of thing.
The skeptical child makes me suspect that I came across differently than intended, though I’m not certain exactly which way.
Or squirted someone in the eye with citrus juice. That burns.
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