Crime Scene: Chasing Down a GPS Blip to a Stolen iPhone

Devices like hers were stolen 16,000 times last year in New York City. But what happened on this afternoon was anything but commonplace. The closest comparison that leaps to mind is a classic chase scene from a 1971 thriller.

The teenager, soon out of sight, had every reason to believe his getaway was whistle clean. The woman, with just as many reasons to believe that was the last she would see of her phone, flagged a police officer, who put a call over the radio with a description of the young man wearing a yellow hooded sweatshirt. Another officer pulled out his own iPhone, and together with the victim, logged into the Find My iPhone feature, which should work if the thief had not turned the victim’s phone off.

He had not. A telltale dot appeared on the screen of the officer’s phone. The victim’s phone was nearby, at 126th Street and Roosevelt Avenue.

“That’s a block away,” Police Officer Haaris M. Hamid, 28, said. He got behind the wheel of an unmarked car, his sergeant beside him. “I can get there and get the guy,” the officer said.

They arrived at the corner where the phone should have been, under an elevated stop on the No. 7 train. The officer and the sergeant looked around and then ran upstairs. Nothing. A train had just pulled away.

Officer Hamid called his colleague with the Find My iPhone feature and asked him to refresh the search. This time, it came up at 111th Street and Roosevelt.

The thief had to be on the subway.

They ran back downstairs to the car. The chase was on. Officer Hamid, his car siren blaring, wove through traffic and blew through intersections while the sergeant called out on the radio, looking for a means of stopping the train.

They arrived at the 111th Street station, still lagging behind the subway, and lingered long enough to make sure the people exiting the station did not include the suspect. They raced on, to the 103rd Street stop. Same thing: train leaving, no yellow hoodies.

Onward the officer drove, around cars beneath the subway tracks, like Gene Hackman’s character, Detective Popeye Doyle, in “The French Connection.” Of course, Popeye was after a cop-killing henchman for a drug smuggler, while Officer Hamid was chasing a teenager who had stolen a woman’s iPhone. But, as they say, the city has changed.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy,’ ” Officer Hamid, a seven-year police veteran, recalled. “It was seriously like a movie.”

A police captain called the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and the subway’s conductor was ordered to stop the train short of the next station, at Junction Boulevard. Officer Hamid, his sergeant, and a captain and a lieutenant who had joined the chase ran upstairs.

The conductor opened the door. “I was pretty much at the end of the line,” Officer Hamid said. “You’ve got to let the bosses go first and everything.”

The bosses and officer went car to car, looking at faces. Around the fourth car, Officer Hamid saw a young man whom he recognized from Flushing. He was wearing a blue sweatshirt. But still. “I go, ‘Sarge, that’s him.’ ”

Asked where he was coming from, the young man replied, “Brooklyn.” The No. 7 train makes exactly as many stops in Brooklyn as it does on Uranus.

Other passengers were watching with interest. So were the bosses. Officer Hamid hoped he had the right guy. The victim was on the street below, with other officers. Officer Hamid called down and asked someone to dial the victim’s phone.

“It rang,” Officer Hamid said. “In his back pocket. I was like, ‘Thank God.’ ” Passengers broke out in chatter, and the suspect’s eyes opened wide. “Like, ‘Uh-oh,’ ” Officer Hamid said. The suspect, Jordan Osborne, 19, had a yellow hooded sweatshirt in his backpack. He later told officers, “I took the phone to sell it,” according to a criminal complaint. “I was short on cash.” The police and the suspect left the train, which resumed its journey to Manhattan.

The suspect remains at Rikers Island while the case is pending.

Simple arithmetic suggests there were 42 other phones or electronic devices stolen in New York that day.

E-mail: crimescene@nytimes.com

Twitter: @mwilsonnyt

City Room: Crime Is Up, and Bloomberg Blames iPhone Thieves

Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

Updated, 11:50 a.m. | Hold onto your iPhones!

Major crime in New York City inched up this year, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Friday fingered the culprit: too many iPhones and iPads were being swiped.

A rise in thefts of shiny Apple products accounted for the slight increase in the city’s annual crime index, a statistic that covers a number of felonies, including murder, grand larceny and robbery, Mr. Bloomberg said on Friday morning during his weekly radio show.

As of Monday, the Police Department recorded 3,484 more major crimes in 2012 than for the same period last year. The increase in Apple product thefts: 3,890.

In a more serious vein, Mr. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly also announced that as of Friday morning, New York City had recorded 414 homicides, putting it on pace to record the lowest annual number since the city started tracking comparable homicide figures in 1963. The current low, 471 homicides, was set in 2009.

Still, city officials said the overall crime figure was skewed by the Apple figure.

“If you just took away the jump in Apple, we’d be down for the year,” said Marc La Vorgna, the mayor’s press secretary.

On the radio, Mr. Bloomberg said that Apple products appeared to be the preference for many thieves, noting that he was not including thefts of competing devices, like the Samsung Galaxy, in his count.

And he offered some practical advice for listeners, urging them to keep their devices in an interior, hard-to-reach pocket.

“Put it in a pocket in sort of a more body-fitting, tighter clothes, that you can feel if it was — if somebody put their hand in your pocket, not just an outside coat pocket,” the mayor said.

IPhones have long proved irresistible to city thieves, particularly on the subway, where crime rates shot up in 2011 after police investigators discovered that robbers were targeting the expensive, high-tech gadgets. The Police Department has used dozens of decoy officers and unusual methods to try to stanch the thefts, which usually occurred as trains entered and left stations, allowing for a quick getaway.

“The proliferation of people carrying expensive devices around is so great,” Mr. La Vorgna said. “It’s something that’s never had to be dealt with before.”

Through Monday, the city had recorded 108,432 major crimes for the year, up from 104,948 over the same period in 2011, a rise of 3.3 percent.

NYPD Officer Kills Unarmed Motorist

A passenger says there was nothing to provoke police to fatally shoot an unarmed Army National Guardsman driving on a New York City highway. Diane Deferrari says the bullet that struck Noel Polanco in the abdomen narrowly missed her. She said uniformed officers pointed their guns through her open window. She said the officers were yelling obscenities before pulling their car over near LaGuardia Airport on Thursday. Deferrari said one of the officers told her: "Your friend shot himself." An off-duty police officer, Vanessa Rodriguez, was asleep in the back seat. She was awakened by the gunshot. Police say it's unclear what prompted Det. Hassam Hamdy to shoot. Deferrari said she complied with an order to raise her hands, but the driver's hands remained on the wheel.

Seattle Police Department Uses Twitter to Report Crime

But does “local” mean the same thing in the disembodied chatter of social media? The Seattle Police Department, which presides over one of the nation’s more tech-savvy — if not saturated — cities, is diving in to find out, in a project that began last week with 51 hyper-local neighborhood Twitter accounts providing moment-to-moment crime reports.

The project, called Tweets-by-beat, is the most ambitious effort of its kind in the nation, authorities in law enforcement and social media say, transforming the pen and ink of the old police blotter into the bits and bytes of the digital age. It allows residents — including, presumably, criminals — to know in almost real time about many of the large and small transgressions, crises, emergencies and downright weirdness in their neighborhoods.

Say you live on Olive Way east of downtown. There was an “intoxicated person” on your street at 3:31 a.m. Monday, so the neighborhood report said, as well as a “mental complaint,” unspecified and mysterious, nearby at 9:30 a.m. Sunday was busy for property crime on the beat, with two burglaries and a shoplifting case, along with a grab bag of noise and disturbance complaints, accident investigations and a several reports of “suspicious vehicles.”

“More and more people want to know what’s going on on their piece of the rock,” said the chief of police, John Diaz. “They want to specifically know what’s going on in the areas around their home, around their work, where their children might be going to school. This is just a different way we could put out as much information as possible as quickly as possible.”

Not everything that happens in a neighborhood will automatically pop up in 140 characters or fewer. Sex crimes were excluded, on the theory that Web attention could discourage people from reporting a rape or sexual assault, and domestic violence cases will remain off the Twitter list as well for similar reasons. Drawing attention to a private matter and alerting neighbors, department officials said, could make things worse for the victim.

The reports are also structured with an automatic one-hour delay, aimed at preventing people from learning about an investigation in progress and swarming over to gawk and perhaps interfere.

“This is trailblazing stuff,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. “It shows a willingness I haven’t seen in large supply to really affirmatively make available, warts and all, a clear picture to people of what’s going on.”

But Professor O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and prosecutor, said he thought there could be unintended consequences. Increased awareness of local crime, he said, could lead people to a greater feeling of vulnerability or to the conclusion that the police are not resolving the local crime problem — even if it is a problem they might not have been aware of had the beat-tweet not informed them.

The Seattle police have reasons to want to appear forthcoming. The department is in the middle of an internal overhaul as well as a court-directed settlement with federal prosecutors prompted by investigations that found a pattern of misconduct, including excessive force and ethnic and racial insensitivity. The Twitter program is one of 20 initiatives in 20 months announced this year by Mayor Mike McGinn — specifically No. 17, to “provide better information to the public.”

But will residents really want the minutiae of daily police life popping up on their smartphones or other devices? Police officials are not sure, but they say that if it lifts the veil even a bit about what they do, it could lead to more understanding of the rhythms — and sometimes the tedium — of their work.

Consider the “accident investigation” at 35th Avenue Southwest and Southwest Barton Street reported at 4:01 p.m. last Wednesday. Sounds as if it could be pretty dramatic, right? Officer Scott Luckie, a four-year veteran with the department, thought so, too. The radio dispatcher said a bicyclist and a car were involved, with possible injuries. So he responded with lights and siren, only to find a man sitting on the curb, unhurt, his bicycle undamaged, more angry than anything else, that a driver had cut him off on a corner.

“I was scared to death,” the bicyclist said.

He and the other responding officers milled around a bit, made sure the bike and biker were O.K., and drove away.

“A slow day is a good day — it means people aren’t out being stupid,” Officer Luckie said, back behind the wheel.

Critics who track social media trends say an automated community bulletin board like Seattle’s will certainly be fast and cost-effective. But a system run by computers also has the drawback of, well, being run by computers.

If a person responds to a local beat post, say, asking about an incident, or volunteering that he might have important information about a crime, the reply might well be missed. The automated posting system will not be regularly monitored, a spokesman for the department said, because there are so many beats.

The department’s main Twitter site, though, is run by real people, and feedback there about the project has ranged from the enthusiastic to the head-scratching. A resident asked: Who’s doing the posts? Robots, the department responded. Well, not really. “Technically, our computer dispatch system, but robots sounds more exciting,” the department’s reply said.

One follower of the new beats, John Eddy, said he liked the truncated computer-speak of some of the posts. “ ‘Urinating in pub’ is my favorite so far,” he wrote on his own Twitter account.

One law enforcement media expert, Capt. Mike Parker, who oversees the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s sprawling public communications system, said he thought the deeper impact of Seattle’s program could be the message it sends to other police agencies, which he said are in many cases timid or uncertain about how to use the new social media tools.

“It gives confidence to other police leaders as well that it’s O.K. to do that,” he said.

Twitter itself, meanwhile, was suspicious of the idea. The project was delayed for several weeks after Twitter closed down 18 of the Police Department’s new accounts. Lots of new Twitter addresses popping up all at once apparently raised red flags that a spammer might be setting up shop. The crime beat feeds were thus delayed... to prevent a potential crime.