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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.)
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.
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