“New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton on Monday joined the family of a young woman who was murdered for her brand-new iPhone to support a proposal that would require smartphone manufacturers to install ‘kill switch’ technology in their devices to deter similar thefts,” Amber Sutherland and Bruce Golding report for The NY Post.
“Schneiderman said the industry has “dragged its feet” since officials and consumers began demanding action last year. He said the theft of smartphones ‘is so common a crime, it has its own name: They call it ‘Apple Picking,”” Sutherland and Golding report. “Bratton blamed smartphone manufacturers for not acting on their own, saying, “Let’s be quite clear about this, the elephant in the room is once again corporate greed. ‘Profit — that’s what this is all about,’ Bratton said.”
MacDailyNews Take: Bandaids, bromides and re-election campaigns – that’s really what this is all about. Why do your job when you can get a bunch of free publicity and look like you’re “doing something” by trotting out bereaved family members during a press conference and blaming an inanimate object and the ever-popular “corporate greed” for your failure to effectively reduce/deter crime? Better get to work on those “kill switches” for purses, necklaces, and Air Jordans, virtuous crime-fighters!
Sutherland and Golding report, “[Bratton contined], ‘You’re making 30, 40, maybe 50 billion dollars a year on new phone sales, all the apps that have to be recreated, they’re making a fortune on this and they don’t want to lose it. So shame on them.'”
MacDailyNews Take: By the sound of it, there isn’t enough shame, or clues, in the entire universe for the likes of the shameless, or clueless, Bill Bratton.
Sutherland and Golding report, “Murder victim Megan Boken, 23… was shot last year by a teenage thug in St. Louis, where she had attended college and returned for an alumni volleyball game. She was sitting in her car and using her phone to talk to her mom when Keith Esters walked up, demanded the device at gunpoint and fatally shot Boken twice when she resisted. Esters pleaded guilty last year and was sentenced to life plus 20 years in the slammer.”
MacDailyNews Take: Ooh, that mean old iPhone, jumping up and pulling the trigger on Keith Esters’ gun.
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: In the headline, replace “iPhone” with “purse” to see how NYC officials are trying to apply a bandaid without addressing the real problem: Scumbag murderers.
iPhones don’t kill people, murderers kill people.
To any law enforcement official who tries to blame Apple or inanimate objects for murder: The blood is all over your mollycoddling hands, you horrid hypocrites. Trotting out the victim’s bereaved family members to carry your water is reprehensible and despicable. Instead of parading before pandering news cameras and flapping your gums, how about you STFU and actually get to work deterring crime before it occurs?
Kill switch? Fine. Do it, by all means. (Apple already has done it, by the way.) But know this: The criminals will simply steal something else. And some poor souls will be murdered over whatever item (purse, jewelry, expensive sneakers, etc.) that’s being targeted that day. Those murders (the ones that cannot be linked to a company name and ridden for re-election/re-appointment publicity, of course) will be forgotten virtually immediately by anyone who didn’t directly know the victim, as usual, and nothing whatsoever will be done to address the root reasons why the crime occurred or to even begin to effectively deter such heinous crimes in the future.
Note to Eric Schneiderman, Bill Bratton, etc.: Bandaids don’t cure cancer.
If the family of the slain girl really wants to lobby for something meaningful, something that might actually give a murderous thief at least a moment of pause before deciding to take an innocent life, they should be calling for a real “Kill Switch,” one that when flipped, opens the trap door below the soon-to-be-dangling feet of Keith Esters during his public, nationally-televised hanging.
In addition, effective spending on education (for a change) and getting to these criminals early and working with them to turn their lives around before they graduate to murder and then decades of life on the public dime, wouldn’t be bad ideas either. Of course, these things would cost real money and require real leadership and aren’t nearly as easy as surfing the tears of victims’ families while tossing out bandaids and bromides.
Related articles:
New California bill demands smartphone ‘kill switch’ – February 11, 2014
San Francisco District Attorney to Apple: Enable Activation Lock on every iPhone by default – December 18, 2013
Attorneys General for New York and San Francisco strongly urge iPhone and iPad users to download iOS 7 – September 19, 2013
S.F. district attorney optimistic over Apple, Samsung progress on anti-theft tech for smartphones – July 23, 2013
U.S. State and federal governments test Apple’s iOS 7 activation lock feature – July 18, 2013
U.S. officials call on Apple, other mobile device makers to help stop smartphone theft – June 6, 2013
The New York Times tries to blame Apple for smartphone thefts – May 2, 2013
