Probably the usual reasons. Homogeneity, social cohesion... These are probably not universally correlated with low crime but they certainly tend to be.
Economic diversity, racial diversity, and religious diversity all spring to mind.
EDIT: Downvotes? For this?
I'm not claiming that lacking the diversity is a good thing, merely that having extra options decreases cohesion. The more diverse the economic situation is (say, due to vast wealth inequality) the less cohesion there is. The more diverse the religions are, the less common-ground people have based on religion--as in most of European history. The more racially diverse a place is, the more tensions due to race (LA versus Helsinki).
Is it worth the hit to cohesion to have better diversity? I'd argue that, in the absence of external threats, it absolutely is. But living in a fantasyland where diversity doesn't come at the expense of cohesion doesn't help.
According to Stephen Pinker, the correlation between inequality and violence is weak. It really surprised me, because I always assumed that they’d be linked.
If anything, as hinted above, there are lots of other confounding factors. Also, Wikipedia's wealth inequality list looks a lot less similar to murder rates than the income inequality list I posted above. Would you know off the top of your head if Pinker wrote about wealth or about income inequality? (Or yet another measure?)
I looked it up, since I got downvoted (see sibling comment). Since he’s talking about the Gini coeffecient, I’d presume he’s referring to income inequality, although it’s not explicit.
Right, thanks for the quote. The Gini coefficent is applicable both to income and to wealth inequality, so that doesn't answer the question. (Not your fault, of course.)
”Among economic measures, inequality is generally a better predictor of violence than unemployment. But The Gini coefficient, the standard index of inequality, actually rose in the United States from 1990 to 2000, while crime was fallinh, and it had hit its low point in 1968, when crime was soaring. The problem with invoking inequality to explain changes in violence is that while it correlates with violence across states and countries, it does not correlate with violence over time within a state or country, possibly because the real cause of the differences is not inequality per se but stable features of a state’s governance or culture that affect both inequality and violence. (For example, in unequal societies, poor neighbourhoods are left without police protection and can become zones of violent anarchy.)
According to the data it is very strong. There are only few countries where there is both high economic inequality and low incidence of crime, and those countries are full blown dictatorships like North Korea.
It seems to be somewhat inversely related to diversity but not entirely. As Megan has also written, Greece and Italy are also fairly homogeneous but don't have most of the social characteristics of the Nordics.
It's the inverse of diversity. Economic inequality, religious, philosophical & cultural diversity — make a measure which combines all of those things, then invert it. It'd at least make a start.
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention..., I suspect it has more to do with average wealth / standard of living combined with wealth inequality. "Social cohesion", whatever that means, is probably correlated, but I wouldn't be sure it's the underlying cause.
Iceland only has about 300,000 inhabitants (the same as the city of Santa Ana, ca), and a lot of people are somehow related to each other. In fact, there's an Icelandic dating app that checks if the person you're interested in isn't related to you.
The fact that you made a new account to comment this indicates to me that I should not assume good faith because I know what you were hinting at: race.
Yes but if I did say it like that it would've been flagged by now, instead of getting any kind of discussion or rebuttal about it, because that's how the hivemind works.
I also don't understand why is it bad faith to say or imply that racial homogeinity leads to better cohesion and in turn more safety and equality. I guess I'll never know because any kind of discussion about that is shut off for some reason.
Because we are told and must believe despite contradictory evidence that diversity is always and in every way "our strength".
Even though when discussing company hiring practices people switch their rhetoric to proclaim "our culture" is very important and we must keep our company's culture the same, bring on new people slowly as to preserve the culture etc, etc.
If you love using evidence then you should probably take a look at it once in a while. It’s no coincidence the economic powerhouses in the US are also the most diverse and progressive places in the US, and that the US is the economic center of the world.
Diversity has nothing to do with losing culture. It’s about sharing cultures and understanding other cultures and points of view. Diversity is a fundamental requirement of all life, whether it’s cultural, racial, or cellular and genetic. In all cases diversity increases resilience, whether to new unaccounted for situations or new diseases.
> It’s no coincidence the economic powerhouses in the US are also the most diverse and progressive places in the US [..]
Yeah, right. This has absolutely nothing to do with being 'diverse' and progressive.
I don't know what you had in mind (SV?), but this all is caused by stuff that already happened decades ago. This is pretty well documented history.
> [..] and that the US is the economic center of the world.
Pride goeth before a fall..
And even now, this is only true if you assume certain constraints.
For example, manufacturing? Not true anymore, ridiculous to even think that.
The same with other domains of the economy, I'm not saying this to attack the US, because I actually love you guys, but you have to deal with some serious issues, because before you realize it you're not the center of the world of anything any longer. It can be awfully quick sometimes.
> Yeah, right. This has absolutely nothing to do with being 'diverse' and progressive. I don't know what you had in mind (SV?), but this all is caused by stuff that already happened decades ago. This is pretty well documented history.
You can believe that it's not due to diversity, but you cannot make the argument that SV's current success is based stuff that happened decades ago. That's like saying the US was founded by white people, ensuring its current success. That would basically claim that everything that followed, all policies, events, progress, had no effect? That would be ludicrous.
Interesting that you shoe-horned economics into a discussion about culture and crime.
But anyways, I think Japan, and China would disagree with your arguments.
But more importantly, I think it is the political and social realm where "diversity" causes the most friction.
Increasingly, much of our political, social, and cultural debates and discussions are focused on diversity and racial issues.
The more "diverse" one's citizenry, the more they will be saddled with these kinds of hot-button issues. The more identity groups, the more separate political constituencies will exist.
They crowd out, or influence, almost all other discussions around politics and economic. Increasingly social-justice/multiculturalism/diversity is involved with every issue in the political sphere. This is not a positive development.
To the degree these kinds of changes happen slowly, the more diverse cultures assimilate to the host culture. Diversity supporters do not generally support limited, slow immigration, but rather open borders.
Because there are clear counterpoints to that. Take the Phillipines, or Mexico. Those countries have high gun ownership, violence, and are pretty homogenous too.
If you want a country with white people, take Russia (though I’m not sure how homogenous it is, it’s definitely not US levels of integration).
Simply because some homogenous societies have low murder rates doesn’t mean all do, and does not mean the reason is homogeneity.
Often white racists in the US make the argument that if there was more homogeneity then there wouldbe less violence. However this shirks the responsibility of the white people for the fact that historically they were the instigators of all racial hate. Black people in America have high crime rates due to systematic and concerted efforts to oppress them over 2 centuries. Blaming that oppression as just some natural unavoidable thing that happens when there is racial integration is what one is trying to do when they argue homogenity is the reason, rather than the belief of racial superiority or hate.
If you go to Countries like China, while they can say insensitive things about black people due to the lack of experience interacting with them, they definitely do not harbor any of the American style racial beliefs towards them.
Blaming lack of homogeneity as the cause for racial issues is shirking responsibility for causing them.
The article gave some reasons why. Do you disagree with them, or did you not read them?
"With a small, mostly homogenous population of 340,000 and a high degree of economic equality, Iceland is one of the world’s safest nations. It is the only Nato member without a standing army. [...] Police are not armed [...] The feeling of security is bolstered by Icelanders’ tendency to look out for one another, a tradition that dates back to times when close collaboration was essential to make it through the long, brutal winters."
Two danish sailors picked her up while drunk in a rental car, one of them got off to the ship and the other drove away with her and was not seen until the next morning when he returned the car with a large odometer reading.
Her body was eventually found naked and battered in a distant location, and the rental had forensic sings of having been cleaned of her blood. The sailor was recorded buying cleaning products at the same time, his DNA was found on her discarded clothes and her driving license was found in his cabin on the ship (along with a few pounds of hashish). A truly disturbed individual that tried to pin the murder on his colleague up until the very end.
Also, actual cause of death was drowning which removes some suspicion of involvement from the other sailor since the drowning likely took place much later and further away from his departure.
Kudos to the captain for being very responsible and secretly turning the ship around on suspicion his men were involved.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
---
This is an interesting, longform article that touches on a lot of interesting topics. It's something people here may find interesting which seems to be the case.
I don't have a particular point of view either way other than to say that context matters, and pragmatism matters, and the solution to these potential problems can't be "remove all surveillance" any more than it can be "surveil everything."
It's a long game, adding surveillance. Surely more surveillance would not have prevented this senseless murder. No one knows why it happened; it seems to have occurred without any reason. We can surmise momentary insanity or a drug-induced psychotic episode. The apparent perpetrator refuses to confess, so maybe he doesn't even remember how it happened, though obviously he remembers scrubbing the car.
But CCTV footage wouldn't have stopped this madness.
It would have helped find her body a little more quickly.
In the long term, I guess surveillance would discourage violent crime, as the idea that "they'll see us, the police will catch us" gradually becomes well accepted among people who have the potential to commit crimes. This is probably already true in London, and maybe in other closely-surveilled capital cities.
But even if everyone sane shares the knowledge that "they're watching us", psychotic actors will still do psychotic things.
CCTV has been in London for a long time now, and violent crime is still down from it's introduction. CCTV is not the only factor relevant to a murder rate, and a "spike" in the overall lower numbers should be an expected result.
It is interesting that the article states that Iceland's conclusion from this case (and probably others) is "more surveillance." They don't mention if the autopsy revealed when during the course of these events the girl died. Would more surveillance have prevented her death? Or is the argument that it would serve as a deterrent? It seems remarkable that despite a perceived lack of sufficient surveillance, they have an extremely likely killer convicted, who if not guilty of murder, is most likely otherwise culpable for her death. He was caught on CCTV buying the cleaning equipment for the car, for example. Surely if CCTV is to serve as a deterrent, he would not be caught doing something so... obvious?
I live in Iceland perhaps no more than 200m away from where Birna got in the car. My understanding is that people feel more CCTV would have answered the question of what happened to her sooner. People were very shocked that someone could vanish from Laugavegur (if you’ve never visited, downtown Reykjavik doesn’t have a big city vibe) and there were substantial searches conducted through the downtown area. Were it not for some civic minded people coming across crucial evidence in an unlikely spot the red car involved may not have been identified at all. In short a lot of people empathise with the pain of their loved ones vanishing and not knowing why and in this case lack of CCTV almost played a part in that.
(Just for context, I am Icelandic, but have no other connection to this story.)
> They don't mention if the autopsy revealed when during the course of these events the girl died.
It does, she drowned after she was put in the water.
> It seems remarkable that despite a perceived lack of sufficient surveillance, they have an extremely likely killer convicted
The point is that without that tiny bit of surveillance, it would have been extremely hard to get on the track that led to discovery of incriminating evidence. Without linking the red KIA to Polar Nanooq, it is possible that nothing would have come of it. The perpetrator had left the country with almost all the available evidence, and such a large search would likely not have been launched so her body might have never been discovered.
It was by the skin of their teeth that the police managed to link the car in the first video to the boat. Had the first video been better (or more from the same area), they would have been able to identify the license plates right away.
A second thing to realize is in Iceland, the arguments against surveillance haven't been "we don't want to be watched" nor "it will get abused" -- but rather "we don't need it". It is obvious why this case changed that sentiment.
But the truth is you really don't need it. Based on what the article says, you could pave the place with security cameras and it would be decades before you caught another foreigner murdering one of your teenagers. It's not worth sacrificing your freedom and privacy.
Only just 5 years ago the number of visitors to Iceland was roughly the same as the population (300,000+).. these days it's in the multiple millions.
The increase in tourism has caused an influx in immigration which has subsequently caused an increase in crime. Luckily not much, and it's not because "immigrants cause crime", it's just a byproduct of going from a homogeneous society to one that becomes more made up of outsiders who
sometimes don't have the group's best interest at heart.
At any rate, the point is that here the government is less of a direct threat, and the benefit that could be gained in cases like these is worth the piece of mind that it brings to the public knowing that these systems are used to help in the worst of situations.
For the record I am very pro-privacy, but when you balance the pros and the cons here, the cameras come out on top.
To play devil's advocate, in the U.S. privacy extends, legally, to the degree to which a person has a "reasonable expectation of privacy".
CCTV cameras on public streets (and license plate scanners for that matter) don't, for me, appear to violate that. I suspect that this level of surveillance has done a lot of public good (finding abductors for example).
Are there a significant number of instances when it has done the opposite?
I think it'd be fair to say that's a textbook example of "reasonable expectation of privacy".
If someone watches you walk down the street, your reaction would be somewhere on a scale between not even noticing, and thinking they're a busybody. If they joined you in a stall while you expell a few demons, it's a safe assumption you'd rather different opinion of them.
> It does, she drowned after she was put in the water.
Yes, I understood that, but I just mean there was a 4+ hour window when that could have actually occurred it seems, and I don't know if more surveillance could have improved the precision on that. "Traffic cameras" are common on what I would refer to as "routes" - large roadways heading outside the city. I think that might've helped in this case.
> The point is that without that tiny bit of surveillance, it would have been extremely hard to get on the track that led to discovery of incriminating evidence.
This is a good point. It's tough for me to understand the purpose of a CCTV camera that can't pick out a license plate on a public street - isn't that half the point!? Perhaps just a matter of poor positioning...
FWIW, I'm neither for nor against additional CCTV in major cities. It's got its drawbacks, and of course it's advantages.
> A second thing to realize is in Iceland, the arguments against surveillance haven't been "we don't want to be watched" nor "it will get abused" -- but rather "we don't need it". It is obvious why this case changed that sentiment.
Interesting - definitely cultural. I've noticed similar differences between the US and Canada.
Criminals always follow the path of least resistance.
Like how they steal bicycles because they know police don't have resources to bother with that.
Or how the steal phones from your hand in London for the same reason.
Now imagine if an AI would trace their path through thousands of CCTV cameras. It could even automatically dispatch a squad to arrest them from home. Surely that would deter many of them, since now crime would send you to jail instead of giving you a free phone.
75 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadI wonder why...
EDIT: Downvotes? For this?
I'm not claiming that lacking the diversity is a good thing, merely that having extra options decreases cohesion. The more diverse the economic situation is (say, due to vast wealth inequality) the less cohesion there is. The more diverse the religions are, the less common-ground people have based on religion--as in most of European history. The more racially diverse a place is, the more tensions due to race (LA versus Helsinki).
Is it worth the hit to cohesion to have better diversity? I'd argue that, in the absence of external threats, it absolutely is. But living in a fantasyland where diversity doesn't come at the expense of cohesion doesn't help.
If you sort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq... by "CIA Gini %" and skip the countries where there is no data in that column, then sort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... by the "2010" column, then squint a bit at the top ten or twenty countries in each list, they look kinda correlated. (Or co-correlated with a whole bunch of other factors.)
https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/00346530055...
”Among economic measures, inequality is generally a better predictor of violence than unemployment. But The Gini coefficient, the standard index of inequality, actually rose in the United States from 1990 to 2000, while crime was fallinh, and it had hit its low point in 1968, when crime was soaring. The problem with invoking inequality to explain changes in violence is that while it correlates with violence across states and countries, it does not correlate with violence over time within a state or country, possibly because the real cause of the differences is not inequality per se but stable features of a state’s governance or culture that affect both inequality and violence. (For example, in unequal societies, poor neighbourhoods are left without police protection and can become zones of violent anarchy.)
It seems to be somewhat inversely related to diversity but not entirely. As Megan has also written, Greece and Italy are also fairly homogeneous but don't have most of the social characteristics of the Nordics.
It's the inverse of diversity. Economic inequality, religious, philosophical & cultural diversity — make a measure which combines all of those things, then invert it. It'd at least make a start.
I also don't understand why is it bad faith to say or imply that racial homogeinity leads to better cohesion and in turn more safety and equality. I guess I'll never know because any kind of discussion about that is shut off for some reason.
Even though when discussing company hiring practices people switch their rhetoric to proclaim "our culture" is very important and we must keep our company's culture the same, bring on new people slowly as to preserve the culture etc, etc.
Interesting cognitive dissonance.
Diversity has nothing to do with losing culture. It’s about sharing cultures and understanding other cultures and points of view. Diversity is a fundamental requirement of all life, whether it’s cultural, racial, or cellular and genetic. In all cases diversity increases resilience, whether to new unaccounted for situations or new diseases.
Yeah, right. This has absolutely nothing to do with being 'diverse' and progressive. I don't know what you had in mind (SV?), but this all is caused by stuff that already happened decades ago. This is pretty well documented history.
> [..] and that the US is the economic center of the world.
Pride goeth before a fall..
And even now, this is only true if you assume certain constraints. For example, manufacturing? Not true anymore, ridiculous to even think that. The same with other domains of the economy, I'm not saying this to attack the US, because I actually love you guys, but you have to deal with some serious issues, because before you realize it you're not the center of the world of anything any longer. It can be awfully quick sometimes.
You can believe that it's not due to diversity, but you cannot make the argument that SV's current success is based stuff that happened decades ago. That's like saying the US was founded by white people, ensuring its current success. That would basically claim that everything that followed, all policies, events, progress, had no effect? That would be ludicrous.
But anyways, I think Japan, and China would disagree with your arguments.
But more importantly, I think it is the political and social realm where "diversity" causes the most friction.
Increasingly, much of our political, social, and cultural debates and discussions are focused on diversity and racial issues.
The more "diverse" one's citizenry, the more they will be saddled with these kinds of hot-button issues. The more identity groups, the more separate political constituencies will exist.
They crowd out, or influence, almost all other discussions around politics and economic. Increasingly social-justice/multiculturalism/diversity is involved with every issue in the political sphere. This is not a positive development.
To the degree these kinds of changes happen slowly, the more diverse cultures assimilate to the host culture. Diversity supporters do not generally support limited, slow immigration, but rather open borders.
If you want a country with white people, take Russia (though I’m not sure how homogenous it is, it’s definitely not US levels of integration).
Simply because some homogenous societies have low murder rates doesn’t mean all do, and does not mean the reason is homogeneity.
Often white racists in the US make the argument that if there was more homogeneity then there wouldbe less violence. However this shirks the responsibility of the white people for the fact that historically they were the instigators of all racial hate. Black people in America have high crime rates due to systematic and concerted efforts to oppress them over 2 centuries. Blaming that oppression as just some natural unavoidable thing that happens when there is racial integration is what one is trying to do when they argue homogenity is the reason, rather than the belief of racial superiority or hate.
If you go to Countries like China, while they can say insensitive things about black people due to the lack of experience interacting with them, they definitely do not harbor any of the American style racial beliefs towards them.
Blaming lack of homogeneity as the cause for racial issues is shirking responsibility for causing them.
For example there are some ethnic minorities in Japan but the government has long been against that in order to preserve a unified national identity.
Is there a strong national identity or fragmented identities and loyalties?
If you look up crime statistics, there is merit to the argument of homogenous culture = less violent crime. Do you disagree?
Take US as an example. We're always described as having a high gun crime and murder rate relative to some other developed nation.
But if you control for race, those numbers drop previously when looking at whites only. Is this not a worthy fact to point out?
Interesting also that Iceland has high gun ownership rates.. And still very low violent crime.
Well, part of that is that considering population density, its not so easy for one Icelander to meet another.
Edit: Make sure you catch Gregory Cochran's reply.
"With a small, mostly homogenous population of 340,000 and a high degree of economic equality, Iceland is one of the world’s safest nations. It is the only Nato member without a standing army. [...] Police are not armed [...] The feeling of security is bolstered by Icelanders’ tendency to look out for one another, a tradition that dates back to times when close collaboration was essential to make it through the long, brutal winters."
Her body was eventually found naked and battered in a distant location, and the rental had forensic sings of having been cleaned of her blood. The sailor was recorded buying cleaning products at the same time, his DNA was found on her discarded clothes and her driving license was found in his cabin on the ship (along with a few pounds of hashish). A truly disturbed individual that tried to pin the murder on his colleague up until the very end.
Kudos to the captain for being very responsible and secretly turning the ship around on suspicion his men were involved.
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
---
This is an interesting, longform article that touches on a lot of interesting topics. It's something people here may find interesting which seems to be the case.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16828973
I don't have a particular point of view either way other than to say that context matters, and pragmatism matters, and the solution to these potential problems can't be "remove all surveillance" any more than it can be "surveil everything."
But CCTV footage wouldn't have stopped this madness. It would have helped find her body a little more quickly.
In the long term, I guess surveillance would discourage violent crime, as the idea that "they'll see us, the police will catch us" gradually becomes well accepted among people who have the potential to commit crimes. This is probably already true in London, and maybe in other closely-surveilled capital cities.
But even if everyone sane shares the knowledge that "they're watching us", psychotic actors will still do psychotic things.
> They don't mention if the autopsy revealed when during the course of these events the girl died.
It does, she drowned after she was put in the water.
> It seems remarkable that despite a perceived lack of sufficient surveillance, they have an extremely likely killer convicted
The point is that without that tiny bit of surveillance, it would have been extremely hard to get on the track that led to discovery of incriminating evidence. Without linking the red KIA to Polar Nanooq, it is possible that nothing would have come of it. The perpetrator had left the country with almost all the available evidence, and such a large search would likely not have been launched so her body might have never been discovered.
It was by the skin of their teeth that the police managed to link the car in the first video to the boat. Had the first video been better (or more from the same area), they would have been able to identify the license plates right away.
A second thing to realize is in Iceland, the arguments against surveillance haven't been "we don't want to be watched" nor "it will get abused" -- but rather "we don't need it". It is obvious why this case changed that sentiment.
But the truth is you really don't need it. Based on what the article says, you could pave the place with security cameras and it would be decades before you caught another foreigner murdering one of your teenagers. It's not worth sacrificing your freedom and privacy.
Only just 5 years ago the number of visitors to Iceland was roughly the same as the population (300,000+).. these days it's in the multiple millions.
The increase in tourism has caused an influx in immigration which has subsequently caused an increase in crime. Luckily not much, and it's not because "immigrants cause crime", it's just a byproduct of going from a homogeneous society to one that becomes more made up of outsiders who sometimes don't have the group's best interest at heart.
At any rate, the point is that here the government is less of a direct threat, and the benefit that could be gained in cases like these is worth the piece of mind that it brings to the public knowing that these systems are used to help in the worst of situations.
For the record I am very pro-privacy, but when you balance the pros and the cons here, the cameras come out on top.
CCTV cameras on public streets (and license plate scanners for that matter) don't, for me, appear to violate that. I suspect that this level of surveillance has done a lot of public good (finding abductors for example).
Are there a significant number of instances when it has done the opposite?
I don't think security cameras in public place necessarily sacrifice either.
My point is that it depends on each culture's understanding of "freedom" and "privacy".
If someone watches you walk down the street, your reaction would be somewhere on a scale between not even noticing, and thinking they're a busybody. If they joined you in a stall while you expell a few demons, it's a safe assumption you'd rather different opinion of them.
Yes, I understood that, but I just mean there was a 4+ hour window when that could have actually occurred it seems, and I don't know if more surveillance could have improved the precision on that. "Traffic cameras" are common on what I would refer to as "routes" - large roadways heading outside the city. I think that might've helped in this case.
> The point is that without that tiny bit of surveillance, it would have been extremely hard to get on the track that led to discovery of incriminating evidence.
This is a good point. It's tough for me to understand the purpose of a CCTV camera that can't pick out a license plate on a public street - isn't that half the point!? Perhaps just a matter of poor positioning...
FWIW, I'm neither for nor against additional CCTV in major cities. It's got its drawbacks, and of course it's advantages.
> A second thing to realize is in Iceland, the arguments against surveillance haven't been "we don't want to be watched" nor "it will get abused" -- but rather "we don't need it". It is obvious why this case changed that sentiment.
Interesting - definitely cultural. I've noticed similar differences between the US and Canada.
Like how they steal bicycles because they know police don't have resources to bother with that.
Or how the steal phones from your hand in London for the same reason.
Now imagine if an AI would trace their path through thousands of CCTV cameras. It could even automatically dispatch a squad to arrest them from home. Surely that would deter many of them, since now crime would send you to jail instead of giving you a free phone.