{"id":4259,"date":"2018-10-16T02:36:53","date_gmt":"2018-10-16T02:36:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2018\/10\/16\/the-lost-art-of-pickpocketing-why-has-the-crime-become-so-rare-in-the-united-states\/"},"modified":"2018-10-16T02:36:53","modified_gmt":"2018-10-16T02:36:53","slug":"the-lost-art-of-pickpocketing-why-has-the-crime-become-so-rare-in-the-united-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2018\/10\/16\/the-lost-art-of-pickpocketing-why-has-the-crime-become-so-rare-in-the-united-states\/","title":{"rendered":"The lost art of pickpocketing: Why has the crime become so rare in the United States?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Pickpocketing in America was once a proud criminal tradition, rich with drama, celebrated in the culture, singular enough that its practitioners developed a whole lexicon to describe its intricacies. Those days appear to be over. \u201cPickpocketing is more or less dead in this country,\u201d says Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, whose new book <\/span>Triumph of the City<\/i><\/a><\/font>, deals at length with urban crime trends. \u201cI think these skills have been tragically lost. You\u2019ve got to respect the skill of some pickpocket relative to some thug coming up to you with a knife. A knife takes no skill whatsoever. But to lift someone\u2019s wallet without them knowing \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Marcus Felson, a criminologist at Texas State University who has spent decades studying low-level crime, calls pickpocketing a \u201clost art.\u201d Last year, a New York City subway detective told the <\/span>Daily News<\/a><\/i> <\/span>that the only pickpockets left working the trains anymore were middle-aged or older, and even those are few and far between. \u201cYou don\u2019t find young picks anymore,\u201d the cop told the paper. \u201cIt\u2019s going to die out.\u201d A transit detective in the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, which operates the Boston area\u2019s bus, commuter rail, and subway system, concurred via e-mail. \u201cPickpockets are a dying breed,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe only known pickpockets we encounter are older, middle-aged men; however, they are rarely seen on the system anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The decline of dipping on the rails is extraordinary. Subways were always the happiest hunting grounds for pickpockets, who would work alone or in teams. There were classic skilled canons\u2014organized pickpocket gangs\u2014at the top, targeting wealthier riders, then \u201cbag workers\u201d who went for purses, and \u201clush workers\u201d who disreputably targeted unconscious drunks. Richard Sinnott, who worked as a New York City transit cop in the 1970s and \u201880s, also admiringly recalls \u201cfob workers,\u201d a subspecies of pickpocket who worked their way through train cars using just their index and middle fingers to extract coins and pieces of paper money\u2014a quarter here, a buck there\u2014from riders\u2019 pockets. \u201cThey weren\u2019t greedy, and they never got caught,\u201d says Sinnott. Bit by bit, fob workers could make up to $400 on a single subway trip; then they\u2019d go to Florida in the winter to work the racetracks. Many of the city\u2019s pickpockets trained elsewhere, \u201cand if they were any good, they came to New York,\u201d Sinnot says, with a touch of pride. \u201cIn the subways, we had the best there were.\u201d Pickpocketing remained fairly rampant for years. Glenn Cunningham, who was part of an elite NYPD anti-pickpocketing task force in the 1980s and \u201890s (he currently handles security for Robert De Niro\u2019s hotel and film festival), says that pickpocketing in spots like Times Square was \u201cout of control\u201d at that time. \u201cI made tons of arrests with those guys. We were like cowboys.\u201d<\/p>\n

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That was then. In a <\/span>2001 story<\/a>, the <\/span>New York Times<\/i> <\/span>reported that there were 23,068 reported pickpocketing incidents in the city in 1990, amounting to nearly $10 million in losses. Five years later, the number of reported incidents had fallen by half, and by the turn of the millennium, there were less than 5,000. Today, the NYPD doesn\u2019t even maintain individual numbers on pickpocketing…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

https:\/\/slate.com\/culture\/2011\/02\/the-lost-art-of-pickpocketing-why-has-the-crime-become-so-rare-in-the-united-states.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pickpocketing in America was once a proud criminal tradition, rich with drama, celebrated in the culture, singular enough that its practitioners developed a whole lexicon to describe its intricacies. Those days appear to be over. \u201cPickpocketing is more or less dead in this country,\u201d says Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, whose new book Triumph of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-16H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4259\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}