I’ll admit, I was one of the many people oogling over Apple’s latest announcement of their new iPhone product, and new iPhone OS 3.0 release this past week. The iPhone and iPod lines from Apple have become a staple product for many people around the world, including people that have entire song collections on them, or manage business affairs right from their phones.
That popularity sometimes comes with a price. As I watch the crime reports each day, I see as a more and more common occurrence “theft of ipod from car”. Now, the crime reports are just a subjective listing of specific issues that the Crime Prevention department of the RPD and OCSO decide to release to the public, but I wanted to do a little data mining, and see if I could see a trend in the number of iPod and iPhone thefts over the past few years.
I want to emphasize this is not a scientifically accurate measurement of thefts in Rochester, this is just a search on the published CopTalkLive crime summaries for the past few years. I’m sure many more thefts of iPods and iPhones don’t get specifically listed, or the devices themselves don’t get named on the report. But, this is just a quick and dirty way to see if there has been any trend increase of thefts, and it certainly looks like there has been.
Just remember one thing, even if you live in a great neighborhood — don’t leave your valuables in your car! Thieves just pick random streets to walk up and down, look for anything worth taking, and they’ll bust out a window, or find unlocked cars to prey on. Especially expensive devices with information on them that would be painful, or impossible to replace.
Now, that said … time to order my new iPhone from Apple. 
Graph needs a trend line