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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3741 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 27, 2022

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Why don’t US cities have pickpockets? I’ve always heard (in the US) that if you’re traveling to a major city in Europe to be on the lookout for pickpockets, and I’ve heard stories from a few people who have had wallets/passports/phones stolen there. But despite the US having more crime in general I’ve never heard of this happening in any US city. You hear that there are certain parts of US cities to avoid, and I’ve heard stories of muggings or bikes being stolen, but nothing about pickpockets. Does anyone have a theory about why this is?

I have no data, but I have to imagine pickpocketing is much riskier in the US, given some fraction of the victims may be armed.

This seems like an implausible, if flattering to the firearms crowd, explanation. In many European cities pickpockets basically only target tourists (preferably East Asian ones), of whom there are even more in the US and who I'd expect to basically never be armed; pickpockets everywhere are known to be discerning about their marks/good at identifying easy targets anywhere; and even if some pickpocket's mark turned out to have a concealed firearm, how would that endanger the thief? As far as I understand, shooting at someone running away with your wallet doesn't normally count as self-defense, and most parts of the US are probably not far enough down the Somalia spectrum that the shooter would risk it in the expectation of getting away with it.

(Are you perhaps confusing pickpocketing for mugging of the "dragged into a dark alley and threatened with a knife" kind? I'm not aware of that being common in absolute terms in Europe, or more common than in the US. If anything my priors would be to be more worried about it in the US, because I'd expect more potential robbers to have access to guns, whereas as a tourist/visitor in the US I may not be legally allowed even if I were a firearm-carrier in my homecountry, and tourists are probably the juiciest target everywhere.)

In Texas and a few other red states it is legal to shoot a man running off with your wallet and this fact is taught in concealed carry license classes.

I do think that much laxer self defense laws play a role- almost everywhere in the US allows you to beat your pickpocketer even if you can’t shoot them, at least in practice.

No I'd expect mugging to be relatively more common in the US where weapons are more available.

Don’t we see the opposite, if anything, where mugging is mostly associated in the US with places that have strict gun control regimes(eg New York) and not with places that have lax ones(eg Houston), despite the often higher murder rate in the latter?

It’s reasonable to attribute this to fear of armed victims by potential muggers in Texas(where lethal violence is allowed in more or less any defense of property… or in immediate attempts to recover property), but not in NYC.

Other posters point to the Roma, but let's explore the difference between the Roma and the stereotype American underclass. The Roma are defined by tribalism, an absolute devotion to preserving their own traditions and family. The American underclass is defined by a near total lack of parental involvement, a sky high rate of fatherlessness, kids getting "lost in the system" after cps takes them away, foster care, raised by grandparents, etc. If you're born into a two parent household in America you are wildly likely to escape absolute poverty and crime, while efforts to break Roma gangs have historically relied on getting the children away from criminal parents.

Pickpocketing, done right, is a skill one must learn. It requires coaching, practice, dexterity, memorization of plays, teamwork. It's the kind of thing that will be passed down within a family, not the kind of thing 5 fatherless boys on a block will invent for themselves. If one was born into a criminal family in America, odds are the father is gonna get three strikes and 20 years before he can teach the kids anyway.

It does not necessarily have to be some high-skill job of slicing the purse and removing the wallet silently. My "pickpocketing" experience from Barcelona with my friends was once somebody attempted to steal a phone from the restaurant table, the other time somebody wanted to take my backpack in similar situation. It is apparently so prevalent that all waiters politely reminded us to safeguard all our belongings - and supposedly the situation got worse after COVID. In Latin America it is "popular" to have people on motorcycle running around and stealing shit from people on the sidewalk. This type of crime is not exactly something that requires high skill.

See, not to play no true Scotsman, but that's not really a pickpocket, that's just a purse snatcher. The warning to American tourists from your uncle who tells you bring a moneybelt is something like "and I didn't even realize the money was gone until I went to pay for a drink that night!" Purse snatchers and phone grabbers exist in America just as well, what we don't typically have is the high skill "And I didn't even know it happened!" stuff. But maybe this is all my great aunt's generation warning us about stuff that never happened in our years anyway?

Given, I didn't get pickpocketed when I was in Barcelona. But then, I've also never been mugged in Flatbush, beat up in the Bronx, shot in Chicago, or carjacked in Oakland {though I have been to Boston in the fall.} Despite being drunk, white, out of place, overdressed, and a pussy in all those places. So for whatever reason my luck seems to run well there.

Look, in my eyes it is the same. Pickpocket gangs are basically organized as snatchers. If you detect a pickpocket suddenly 4 people around you turn aggressive and it turns to snatching/attempted snatching.

So my argument is that pickpocketing is just a developed version of snatching. But no worries, we are going to get there at least in Europe.

I would delineate between bag snatching and pickpocketing. Both are probably more common in Europe.

Pickpocketing is done almost exclusively by Roma people and there are barely any Roma in the US.

there are lots of Roma in the US, they just integrated rather than forming societal enclaves

There’s plenty of Roma societal enclaves in the USA, they just run scams of varying description(I’ve run into ones doing fraudulent auto work in the past, and I’ll eat a hat if they weren’t up to their eyeballs in some kind of tax fraud scheme. I’ve also heard of them being fences.) rather than pickpocketing.

Pickpocketing is also a huge problem in South America, I don’t think you can just blame the Roma for all of it.

While I agree with the other commenter that living and travelling in Europe i literally never felt at any danger of being pickpocketed, if there is a real difference in risk I think the reason is pretty self obvious. Especially if you have spent some time in Eastern Europe or Balkans. How many gypsies are there in the US?

I have lived in various European cities throughout my life and travelled through countless more.

I have personally never been pickpocketed, and neither is it something I ever think about. I think the answer, unless someone presents evidence to the contrary, is that people's perception of European pickpocketing is vastly overinflated.

NYC has pickpockets, especially on the subway. https://nysubway.com/subway-station-safety-tips/ has something that can explain why:

Pick pocketing, purse snatching and violent robberies are very common especially where thousands of local commuters and unsuspecting tourists from all over the world gather, sticking out like ATM machines. Pick pocketing mostly happens on busier stations where there is a crowd, while robberies are more common late at night where there are less passengers around.

You need large numbers of people using public transportation or walking around for pick pocketing to work. I tried to test this theory by googling for pickpocketing news and it looks like the usual suspects like San Francisco with its walkable streets and Muni do have pick pockets as well.

It's very possible that lax US self-defense laws change the pattern of crime committed- you're more likely to either carry a weapon(mugging) or target unattended goods(bike theft) when victims are allowed to beat pickpockets with impunity.

The last I heard about this was years ago and don't currently have any cites, but apparently the US broke up pickpocketing rings in their cities while the Europeans didn't. This was part policy, part sentence length, and partly because European pickpocketing rings are ensconced in difficult to police ethnic communities the way US drug gangs are.

There's a lot of institutional knowledge and organization involved in running pickpocketing scams rather than the customary beating-people-over-the-head-with-a-tire-iron, and putting away the leaders/teachers broke the cycle.

This is now considered "discredited" as it suggests that policing rather than police abolition can reduce crime, but even Slate acknowledged it at one point (along with "lazy millennials don't want to learn an honest trade any more" lol)

Edit: have to give the slate article credit: "professionals from countries like Bulgaria and Romania, each with storied traditions of pickpocketing" is a wonderfully polite way to say "fucking gyppos took my wallet!"

A few possibilities occur:

  1. Pickpocketing takes a certain level of skill. If you're criminally inclined, strong arm robbery or purse snatching are much easier.

  2. Maybe it does occur, but isn't reported to police (either because people assume they just lost their wallet or the amount lost isn't worth the trouble).

  3. Maybe it's reported to police, but isn't considered newsworthy.

Does anyone have a theory about why this is?

Well, in most major US cities, you're going to be transiting it by car. There are a few exceptions to that, of course (New York, parts of southern California, Vegas), but when everyone's in a car the number of potential marks would be abysmal compared to Europe, where because most people are on foot you both have a much wider selection of targets and crowd cover to help you get away.

Of course, there's probably a substitution effect going on; the equivalent crime in the US is probably carjacking. But then again, stolen cars are a bit more difficult to fence (unless parted out) and get away with if the police are pursuing you, so all else being equal I'd expect there to be proportionally less of those.

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