The selection process for phones is already there: unless you are a very good thief, you're not stealing cellphones. That's because realistically your two ways of stealing a cellphone is either skillful pick-pocketing/misdirection, or muggings. Now if you're a crackhead, mugging people is not a very good idea for obvious reasons, and the subtler ways of stealing a cellphone already select for experienced thieves.
The number one reason why bikes are stolen so much is not because they are easy to steal, it is because there is essentially no risk of getting caught. No one will give a shit if you're stealing a bike, and so even professional bike thieves will simply pop your lock with a Ramset gun without a care in the world and be on their merry way hours before you even notice. Whereas stealing a cellphone, unless very skillful, requires direct confrontation, which is not an issue.
>But again, that's post-hoc statistics. You're looking at the world that already has the trivial disincentive against amateur thieving. So of course you'll see most stolen phones being stolen by professionals—the amateur thieves are already not bothering, so if a phone is being stolen at this point, it's being stolen by a professional thief!
I seriously disagree for the reasons I outlined above. The kind of people that would steal phones are the kind of people that know how to offload it. Again, maybe this is different in the US, but anyone with shady friends here could figure out how to fence a stolen phone. It's really not nearly as exclusive as you might think. I personally know two people I could offload a stolen phone (that I entered into contact via my elementary school of all places), and I am very, very, very far from being the kind of person that needs to steal phones in order to subsist. The hardest crime I ever did was to give my friend a USB key with mp3s of Akon in 2011.
And even if it wasn't the case, do you really think a crackhead would not try to steal a phone anyways? Of course they would, and they could probably figure out a way to fence it for 20$ or so. They just don't want to because stealing something that is either in your pocket or in your hands 24/7 is way too much risk for way too little reward.
But again, that's post-hoc statistics. You're looking at the world that already has the trivial disincentive against amateur thieving. So of course you'll see most stolen phones being stolen by professionals—the amateur thieves are already not bothering, so if a phone is being stolen at this point, it's being stolen by a professional thief!
In a world without that disincentive, the statistics would skew very differently.
I again compare to the market for stolen bicycles. Yes, there are professional thieves with "bicycle chop shops" et al. But there are also crackheads carrying around bolt-cutters who just want to take a bike they walk by, ride it back to the ghetto, and then sell it for $20 to a street passerby to buy their next fix. Most cities have a large bike-theft problem, and it's mostly from this kind of thief, not from professional thieves. Any "security bike lock"—i.e. any bike lock you can't just snip through with bolt cutters—stops this kind of thief.
Look at New York City, for example. There are two types of bikes in NYC: those with security locks, and those that get stolen the instant they're left alone for ten minutes. The security lock wouldn't deter a professional thief—but a professional thief prioritizes, stealing fancy bikes from e.g. university sports department bike parkades, and won't bother with your average commuter bike. The crackhead does not prioritize. They just want $20, and your bike is probably worth $20.