steal yer phone

Among his various legacies, Steve Jobs, whose memorial continues with the arrival of the iPhone 4S, left us with a tangible and resonant symbol of our economic frictions: an easily brandished, easily taken device that in its sleek design and intuitive simplicity flaunts the relative effortlessness of affluent, knowledge-class living. The have-nots, particularly teenagers, covet and seek what, by now, the haves assume as birthright and dependency.

For the past few years, The Brooklyn Paper, a free weekly, has meticulously chronicled iPhone thefts in the 35 neighborhoods it covers. Each week the paper’s police blotter is filled with descriptions of thieves running off with iPhones grabbed from complacent citizens who are often in the midst of using them. This happens at all hours — as people emerge from subways, or walk their dogs, or stand on street corners. A database of criminal activity on the paper’s Web site lists “iPhone” as its own category, between “Drunk driving” and “Menacing.”

The New York Police Department does not keep citywide, item-specific data on the robberies and larcenies it records, but the department’s Transit Bureau has attributed the recent rise in subway crime — up 17 percent compared with the same time last year — to the theft of electronic gadgetry. Over 1,000 subway riders have been the victims of larceny this year, though it is unclear how many of them were the targets of iPhone thieves. The phone’s popularity is indisputable: During a single month last spring, five of the seven mobile phones stolen from subway riders inManhattan’s First Precinct were Apple-made. Beyond trains and platforms, about half of the robberies recorded in late summer in Brooklyn’s 88th Precinct (which encompasses Fort Greene) involved iPhones, the police said.

Stolen phones are typically deactivated by their owners right away, but the fact that phones require new operating systems to be useful hasn’t proved a deterrent. Now, though, a thief faces the prospect that the victim might have a tracking system or application in place.

Brian Chattoo, 23, was charged this month in connection with the theft of an iPhone from the coat pocket of a woman on Liberty Avenue in Queens. She had installed the IGotYa application, which photographs anyone who enters the wrong pass code when trying to use an iPhone with a front-facing camera. It then sends the photo, along with a map of the phone’s location, to an e-mail address. Within 25 minutes of the theft of her phone, the victim, Erum Malik, received a photo that the police say showed Mr. Chattoo, along with his location, 113th Street in Queens.

In the annals of New York City crime, the circumstances surrounding iPhone thefts feel comparatively tame. We imagine them to be at the center of a crime wave — “The teenager who has stalked iPhone users in Park Slope for two years continued his reign of terror last week,” The Brooklyn Paper wrote melodramatically in February. But this kind of thinking is preposterous when you consider that in 1969, as Jeffrey Kroessler, a librarian at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me, there were 78,000 auto thefts in New York City, which amounts to 215 a day.

The iPhone, though, is the latest in a succession of status objects that have fostered urban crime. In the 1980s, the craze for Cazal eyeglass frames, West German artifacts with gold insets, which sold for $85 to $200 in stores and commanded $35 to $50 on the street, resulted in the fatal stabbing of a 17-year-old Bronx boy at Broadway and 204th Street one winter afternoon, when five teenagers accosted him and grabbed the pair he was wearing.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, cities across the country were forced to deal with the fact that young people were killing one another for Air Jordans. During the same era, the fad for leather bomber jackets became so intense that the Newark Police Department formed a special task force to deal with the shootings and muggings related to it.

As it happens, communications technology was fueling felonious activity in the city as far back as 85 years ago. In 1926, a man named Paul Hilton roamed Queens, breaking into homes to steal radios. Having shot and killed a patrolman while fleeing a robbery, he was captured at a baseball game and executed at Sing Sing in 1927. By the spring of that year, Hilton had inspired a copycat burglar who stole a $165 radio from a home in Jamaica, Queens, prompting the neighborhood’s police precinct to declare that officers would shoot to kill in similar crimes.

The current spate of iPhone thefts feels, if anything, more poignant than disruptive. Apple products have always read as cooler than their rivals’ because their design suggests a gleaming world of innovation and opportunity, of capitalism behaving well — a world that seems ever diminishing, ever less accessible to the struggling and young.

Unlike the sneakers and glasses that caused such a fury in the ’80s and ’90s, iPhones didn’t originate in the celebrity system. They come with a democratic ethos (if not the analogous price tag); BlackBerrys are for suits, but even a child can work an iPhone. Wasn’t everyone supposed to have a shot?