You target pickpockets by having the police pretend to be a tourist, then arresting anyone who tries to pickpocket them. There's no confusion or profiling going on.

And the rest of your comment is pure whataboutery - yes, we should do both.

It's not whataboutery in the context of limited policing resources and public attention. Accusations of tu quoque get thrown around way too quickly on the internet.

There’s limited resources. How is it whataboutism?

Arresting pickpockets may be an overall gain if tourists feel safe to go out and therefore spend. And rampant wage fraud also ought to be tackled, again possibly a net overall gain if that increases tax revenue. If your country cannot fund a police force that could do both these things then you have much bigger problems.

Is there evidence that pickpocketing is such a problem in the United States that it is making a dent in tourism spending? Is there evidence that policing it in this way makes a dent in the incidence of pickpocketing?

> If your country cannot fund a police force that could do both these things then you have much bigger problems.

Underfunded local institutions are the reality in most of the world, not the exception. I'd rather have bodies investigating people who are witholding wages and illegally paying below the minimum wage then spending their day pretending to be a tourist in the hope that someone pickpockets them.

It's odd - it seems among this class of HN commentator-cum-policymaker, evidence driven policy is an unknown concept.

Pickpockets are much more disruptive to your day than the known quantity of the wages you get not being theoretically as high as they should be. Personally if I was in such an area I'd fill my pockets with rusty nails.

> known quantity of the wages you get not being theoretically as high as they should be

When you're living in poverty, withheld wages is a much larger problem than your apparently daily encounters with aggressive pickpockets, are you kidding me?

What an incredibly tone deaf comment.

Robbery, pickpocketing, car stolen: poor person might lose the majority of their net worth, not be able to get to their job and get fired, probably not be able to replace certain things, etc. potentially spiraling into much worse. Not to mention the effects on your feeling of security.

Wage theft: didn't get paid for doing something before clocking in or got their hours messed with or whatever, which is also very bad of course, but more spread out and not as directly disastrous as the other scenario even if the total numbers might be higher.

So no, it's not tone deaf if you look past your knee-jerk reaction, it's just a well-reasoned justification why someone might be more mad about thieves than wage theft. It's not unreasonable to have the view that one murder is worse than a trillion people stubbing their toes once a week for a year even if the second scenario might add up to a higher score if you added it up by some quantifiable ethical metric.

> Wage theft

Or like you're paid $6/hr to do migrant farm work when the minimum wage is $12. That adds up much more quickly and leads people to turn to things like theft.

That's already half your net worth right there.

> Robbery, pickpocketing, car stolen

The average person, even the average person in poverty, is not going to lose the majority of their net worth from pickpocketing, that's just absurd.

Now you're adding in two other crimes, which you didn't mention in your original comment, (you just said pickpocketing is worse than wage theft). Most people in poverty don't own cars in the first place.

My reaction wasn't knee-jerk - the suggestion that pickpocketing is some sort of epidemic across America affecting the nation's poor is just absurd on face.

Robbery has a specific legal connotation and is not equivalent to theft.

Theft is the unlawful taking of property. Robbery is a subset of theft where violence or the threat of violence is used to accomplish the taking.

Pickpockets are thieves, not robbers.

You're absolutely right, I've edited my comment slightly.

I was making the assumption that total $ robbed was an upper bound on total $ pickpocket, which seems reasonable given what I've observed in the United States - but I am having trouble finding reasonable statistics about incidence in the United States.