We’ve all heard stories about people who have had their smartphone stolen and used a service like Find My iPhone to find the location of the people who stole it and then confront them. I’ve always considered this to be risky behavior as you could get really, really hurt or worse by doing this. Sadly, this has proven to be the case in London Ontario where a teenager by the name of Jeremy Ryan Cook lost his smartphone in a cab and he tracked it down using a service like Find My iPhone. Here’s what happened next according to the National Post:
He left his cellphone in a taxi on the weekend. Using a tracking device on the phone, Cook ended up in a parking lot on Highbury Ave. standing outside a 2004 silver Mazda at 5:15 a.m. Sunday.
There were three men inside and they weren’t giving the phone back to Cook, who was there with a relative, police said.
During the confrontation over the phone, one man jumped out of the car and walked away.
The driver stepped on the gas.
And that’s when Cook did what many 18-year-olds might do if someone was stealing their stuff: He tried to stop them.
Cook grabbed on to the driver’s door and held on to the car while it peeled away, out of the parking lot, heading north on Highbury, then turning east into a plaza on the southeast corner of Huron St. and Highbury, police said. Gunshots rang out. When police arrived, Cook was already dead.
Police are now searching for three people in relation to this murder.
I’ll say two things on this topic. Feel free to disagree with me on any or all of these points. I’m good with that.
First, I suggest that you set up your phone so that you can remotely wipe it and lock it so that nobody else can use it. iPhones, BlackBerry phones, and a lot of Android phones have this capability. That way any personal info can be zapped and the phone can be made to be useless. You should also consider backing up your data (including your photos) to your home computer or to a cloud service like iCloud or to one of Google’s cloud based services. That way you can recover from having your smartphone stolen painlessly. Finally if you do have the location of the phone, give the location to the police and let them get it back for you. I get that the phone is expensive, but it’s not worth your life.
Now, that brings me to the police. One of the reasons why the average person takes these sorts of risks to get back their phone is that most police agencies don’t consider smartphone theft to be a high priority. Now if you compare smartphone theft to say murder, I get where they are coming from. But in my mind it is still a crime and given that in this day and age where it is easy to find the stolen smartphone and the evil doers who stole it, I would like to think that the police will act upon that and take one or more bad guys (or girls) off the street. Perhaps police agencies may want to re-evaluate this going forward. Maybe that would prevent another story like this from hitting the news.
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This entry was posted on June 16, 2015 at 10:37 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Canada, wireless. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Person Shot And Killed While Trying To Retrieve Their Smartphone
We’ve all heard stories about people who have had their smartphone stolen and used a service like Find My iPhone to find the location of the people who stole it and then confront them. I’ve always considered this to be risky behavior as you could get really, really hurt or worse by doing this. Sadly, this has proven to be the case in London Ontario where a teenager by the name of Jeremy Ryan Cook lost his smartphone in a cab and he tracked it down using a service like Find My iPhone. Here’s what happened next according to the National Post:
He left his cellphone in a taxi on the weekend. Using a tracking device on the phone, Cook ended up in a parking lot on Highbury Ave. standing outside a 2004 silver Mazda at 5:15 a.m. Sunday.
There were three men inside and they weren’t giving the phone back to Cook, who was there with a relative, police said.
During the confrontation over the phone, one man jumped out of the car and walked away.
The driver stepped on the gas.
And that’s when Cook did what many 18-year-olds might do if someone was stealing their stuff: He tried to stop them.
Cook grabbed on to the driver’s door and held on to the car while it peeled away, out of the parking lot, heading north on Highbury, then turning east into a plaza on the southeast corner of Huron St. and Highbury, police said. Gunshots rang out. When police arrived, Cook was already dead.
Police are now searching for three people in relation to this murder.
I’ll say two things on this topic. Feel free to disagree with me on any or all of these points. I’m good with that.
First, I suggest that you set up your phone so that you can remotely wipe it and lock it so that nobody else can use it. iPhones, BlackBerry phones, and a lot of Android phones have this capability. That way any personal info can be zapped and the phone can be made to be useless. You should also consider backing up your data (including your photos) to your home computer or to a cloud service like iCloud or to one of Google’s cloud based services. That way you can recover from having your smartphone stolen painlessly. Finally if you do have the location of the phone, give the location to the police and let them get it back for you. I get that the phone is expensive, but it’s not worth your life.
Now, that brings me to the police. One of the reasons why the average person takes these sorts of risks to get back their phone is that most police agencies don’t consider smartphone theft to be a high priority. Now if you compare smartphone theft to say murder, I get where they are coming from. But in my mind it is still a crime and given that in this day and age where it is easy to find the stolen smartphone and the evil doers who stole it, I would like to think that the police will act upon that and take one or more bad guys (or girls) off the street. Perhaps police agencies may want to re-evaluate this going forward. Maybe that would prevent another story like this from hitting the news.
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This entry was posted on June 16, 2015 at 10:37 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Canada, wireless. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.