
How London thieves exploit organisational silos - jakublangr
https://medium.com/@james.langr/how-london-thieves-exploit-organisational-silos-1b12b9beea66
======
Traster
This honestly doesn't seem like a problem with organisational silos. The level
of efficiency the author is suggesting is completely unnecessary. If the
police had done some very basic police work, followed up the unauthorized
transactions at each location for CCTV they would have gotten a very clear
idea of who this person was. In fact hell, find out which phones pinged the
phone tower near each of the locations at each of the relevant times and you
almost certainly have exactly one suspect who'll match the CCTV and would be
banged to rights.

With small crimes it's not that they can't be solved, it's that the UK has
decided it would rather have some petty crime than to pay the taxes necessary
to catch petty criminals (assuming that catching the criminal would even solve
the crime problem). The current state of policing in the UK is that small
thefts won't be investigated - so it doesn't matter how easy they are to
solve.

~~~
dTal
>find out which phones pinged the phone tower near each of the locations at
each of the relevant times

I don't know that that is actually possible. The police can access the records
for any one number, but accessing all the records for a set of towers in a
given time window is a different matter. I would actually love to know if this
is within their capabilities.

~~~
angry_octet
It totally is within the capability of telcos. It's a database query away.
Whether the police can get a warrant for it is a different matter. I'm not au
fait with the details of RIPA post the EU decision [1][2] but it is safe to
say the barriers are not that high. Meta data (like cell tower signal
strength) is almost certainly available. Towers log everything, and location
is a valued derived product.

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/uk-surveillance-
regime...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/uk-surveillance-regime-
violated-human-rights) [2]
[https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mediapolicyproject/2016/01/05/some-t...](https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mediapolicyproject/2016/01/05/some-
things-old-some-things-new-a-clause-by-clause-review-of-the-draft-
investigatory-powers-bill-investigatory-powers-research-group/)

~~~
multjoy
You will _never_ be able to justify the collateral intrusion that getting all
the connections to a single cell site would represent.

If you don't know who you're looking for then it isn't actually that much help
in any case.

Assuming you know that the suspect phone will have pinged a given cell site,
then you still have to work out which phone it was. Assuming that they're not
daft enough to use anything other than an unregistered PAYG sim, then you're
left hoping that the IMEI of their handset has come to police attention.

If you had the resources, you could get the top-up data for all the
unregistered sims attached to that cell site and hope there's CCTV at a given
newsagent or that they've used their own bank account to top up online.

~~~
angry_octet
I'm not sure if you read the links? The UK doesn't have the same requirements
as the US. They don't have a collateral intrusion limitation.

Once you have the IMEI of interest you can find everywhere it has been and
every number dialled, and all DNS requests and IP transfers. You just need a
dialled number which has a plan attached and you can look up the phone book
entry from that persons phone (though police would need a warrant for that).

The only thing preventing the Met from finding this thief is a lack of person
time.

~~~
multjoy
Yes, there is a collateral intrusion limitation. You cannot simply go on a
fishing trip.

Once you have an IMEI number _that you can attribute to the suspect, having
exhausted all conventional means of finding the data_ then you go ahead and
start requesting billing and cell site data.

Note, however, that this won't tell you what ip addresses have been assigned
to that account.

------
esotericn
As others have posted, this is not in any way an issue with organisational
silos.

The Met simply have limited funding and more important matters to investigate.
They are essentially attempting to politely explain that to you.

~~~
logifail
> The Met simply have limited funding [...]

 _Everyone_ has limited funding

> and more important matters to investigate

 _Everyone_ should prioritise what they work on!

Not to be harsh on the OP, but let's compared the total £value of what was
stolen vs the potential [opportunity] cost to the police and other relevant
authorities which would be required to catch and convict the thief.

If the laptop had something the authorities valued, they'd work significantly
harder.

------
paganel
One of the morals of the story is to never leave your wallet out of sight or
out of feel when you’re in public spaces. Leaving your wallet in a back-pack
and the back-pack in a corner of a restaurant/pub is asking for big trouble.
In the very few cases when I have to leave my wallet unattended (like in a
backpack at the side of a basketball court) I previously leave my bank cards
and ID at home, I only bring some cash with me.

~~~
antihero
Especially somewhere as central and busy as KX. Scottish Stores is an ok pub
but fuck off would I let my bag leave my sight in there.

------
Canada
London is really bad for bag snatching. Never, ever leave your wallet, keys,
phone or passport in your bag. Even when you’re holding the bag.

Don’t think for a moment that the theives aren’t watching you. Don’t think
that you can just put your bag down while you look through a rack of clothes
or leave it at your table while you order another drink from the bar. The
theives are brazen, and as the article points out the millions of cameras that
will watch it happen are not there to protect you.

------
laurentl
This reminds me of a card skimmer I found on an ATM about 12 years ago
(unfortunately, _after_ I had used it to withdraw cash). I basically lucked
into finding the camera hole and managed to rip the fake cover + video camera
+ transmitter from the frame of the ATM. With that in hand (unfortunately I
dis not think to also take out the card reader itself), I called the police.
While I was on the phone with them, a foreign couple tried to use the ATM. I
told them not to, they pretended not to understand, I went back to my phone
call with the police. When I turned around, the card reader was gone: that
nice couple was the thieves, they were somewhere near (to catch the video
footage of people entering their PIN) and swooped in to retrieve the card
reader and the data stored in it.

The police squad that came around was fairly decent, but they didn’t really
seem to be on the lookout for this type of crime; one of the cops confessed
that he’d used the same ATM the night before and was genuinely impressed that
I’d spotted it. Spending a couple of hours in the police station to give my
statement (rather than going to the restaurant as initially planned) sucked,
of course. I was shocked at how bad I was at describing the thieves, even
though I’d seen them and talked to them.

Following up with the bank was similarly frustrating; the bank director told
me he personally checked the ATM at opening and closing time, meaning the
thieves installed and removed the card reader every night. I never found out
if the other victims were made aware of the fact that their card details were
stolen.

So, yes, thieves are brazen and smart; police are nice (sometimes) but
helpless or just don’t care about these types of crime; and even though I did
all I could to mitigate the situation, I still felt a bit shitty and helpless
about the whole experience.

------
vinceguidry
This was a smart but unsavvy approach to solving the problem. A better one
would have been to appeal to people's better natures.

I think it can generally be said that bureaucracies mostly exist to serve
other bureaucracies, mere mortals are illegible drains on their resources, to
put it candidly, if they helped every sad sack with a sad story that showed up
at their doorstep, pretty soon that's going to be all they're doing.

So instead you have to persuade, cajole people into helping you out. You find
the one guy with both the spare time and the wherewithal to work the system.
Spin a detective story out of it, make it interesting for them. Never lose
sight of the fact that they're doing you a favor and send a nice thank-you
card after its sorted.

Sure, political forces have driven wedges between institutions that _should_
be public-facing and the public they should be serving. But that doesn't mean
that good people don't still work there. You just have to get them interested.
Anyone you speak to can be cajoled into doing the right thing. But they won't
unless you help them see the light.

------
IshKebab
This should be required reading for all the Americans that think the UK has 50
CCTV cameras per person or whatever that bullshit statistic was.

Yes we have a lot, but they're mostly privately owned and nobody will look at
them for anything less than GBH or murder.

------
jarym
Nicely written article and I am sorry for what happened. Similar thing
happened to a friend of mine some years ago and since then I don’t dare take
my bag out during evenings.

Re The Met - it’s a sad state of affairs with policing in the UK. It comes
down to the following: police only ‘care’ to investigate or deal with 3 types
of criminals: 1\. Terrorists 2\. Paedophiles 3\. Speeding motorists

If you wish to do any other criminality in the UK then you have pretty much
free reign to carry out things with impunity. Government are even talking
about abolishing jail sentences for ‘minor’ crimes (not to improve
rehabilitation but to save money).

I am emigrating. I can see where things are heading and it’s not good for this
country.

~~~
davidmr
Serious question: are there any large (say >2,000,000) cities in western-style
democracies (for example, Singapore is quite safe, but I think their system of
government makes it a little easier to fight petty crime) in which the police
really do take that stuff seriously? It makes me think of that scene in The
Big Lebowski where he asks the cop if they have any leads on his car breakin.

I completely sympathize with this guy, and hope I don’t wind up in his
situation, but how seriously does any big city resident truly expect the
police to take relatively small-value nonviolent property crimes?

~~~
barry-cotter
Tokyo

------
ddalex
Anyone who has lived for any time in London knows that bag disappears. A lot.
A coworker lost a week of work when his bag was snatched during the Friday pub
drinks.

Mind your belongings. Police will not do anything about it.

------
caymanjim
The only thing this thief exploited is the idiocy of the victim, who carried
around a backpack full of expensive items, his passport (leave it at home or
in the hotel), and his wallet (put it in your pocket), and then left it piled
in the corner. Of a bar.

We should all be glad that the police don't waste their time on petty crime
like this. This guy didn't deserve this, but the rest of us shouldn't have to
pay for his naivety.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> his passport (leave it at home or in the hotel)

You may be legally required to carry it with you. In China this is the case.
(Or at least, China publishes a lot of documentation for foreigners claiming
it is the case. I don't see why they'd be wrong about that.)

I don't carry my passport with me anyway, because that is crazy, but I don't
like being placed in the wrong like that either.

~~~
noir_lord
Not in any way victim blaming but there is zero requirement to carry ID in the
UK (except if you are young and want to get served for alcohol).

They tried to introduce national ID cards a few times and it got voted down
each time.

FWIW I have no issue with a national ID card if it's purely _that_ ,
Identification but the government couldn't leave it at that and wanted to tie
the card to _everything_.

Turning a reasonable idea into a terrible idea.

Given the way they expand everything to compromise peoples privacy I don't
trust them not to do it after the fact either so generally I'm on the no to
national ID side.

Because I don't trust my government at all.

~~~
ownagefool
Hooking it up to other Government systems such as tax, health, immigration,
etc could be pretty useful. Currently each of the departments have to figure
this out itself, and it is pretty messy from my understanding.

With an ID card, I probably shouldn't need a drivers license or a passport (
ignoring that some contries still stamp your passport, so this might not be
achievable ). But I also probably shouldn't be required to carry on unless I'm
trying to do something that requires one.

Once we've paid to solve the issue once, we shouldn't be paying over and over
again. Next, once you have an identity, do you really want your bank or
equifax to pay and build for the exact same thing? Sure they're private
entities, but they're private entities that you can't avoid who pass the cost
back to you, so why pay again?

On the other hand, this would likely make things like the porn pass easier to
implement, so maybe we need to sort out the fact we're living in a nanny state
first.

------
nutjob2
This fellow should follow the police's lead: it's petty crime that is unlikely
to get resolved without an uneconomic expenditure of limited time and
resources. What is he reasonably hoping to achieve?

Understandably he seems to be personally outraged by his experience, but if he
put his emotions aside he'd put it down to experience, make an insurance
claim, get his documents and cards reissued and move on.

~~~
dukoid
Uneconomic when looking at this one single case perhaps -- probably not when
looking at the thief's career though. Also, if there is no effort to stop
small crimes, that seems to send a very bad signal...

~~~
noir_lord
The government has cut police budgets in real terms _massively_ over the last
decade or so.

Even if they wanted to current police forces simply lack the resources,
they've (the gov) also juggled the crime stats so it looks like crime has
stayed steady or declined (hence they can 'justify' the cuts).

The UK is in a complete shambles at the moment.

Years of unnecessary austerity combined with a government determined to
privatise everything no matter what the actual (if any) benefit on ideological
grounds has left it that way..but we keep voting for them and so we get the
government we deserve* (*which we wouldn't have if we could get rid of our
stupid first past the post voting system).

------
usgroup
TLDR : thieves often get away with crime because resources are limited, and
smarter thieves play into it.

However I hardly think that concerntrating power is a solution nor that this
is really a problem that needs to be solved by finding he thieves.

I’d be curious to know by how much incidents of petty crime are reduced for
every 1% increase in the wealth of the poorest 5%.

Meanwhile, I think the police are doing the right thing by focusing on
organised and serious crime, and society would be doing the right thing if it
focused on the causes of crime rather than on expanding the police force.

