I can’t seem to summon much nostalgia for the lost art of pickpocketing:
In a 2001 story, the New York Times 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’t even maintain individual numbers on pickpocketing. “It’s hardly a problem anymore,” says a department spokesperson. The FBI’s definition of the crime is more inclusive than what we would consider a classic pick — the bureau defines it as “the theft of articles from a person by stealth where the victim usually does not become immediately aware of the theft,” according to a spokesman — but even broadly defined, that category of larceny-theft has been falling sharply for years.
Experts offer a few explanations for the gradual disappearance of pickpockets in the United States. Crime nationwide — from pickpocketing to homicide — has been dropping since the mid-1990s. People carry less cash today, and thanks to enhanced security features, it’s harder for thieves to use stolen credit or debit cards than it was in the past. And perhaps most important, the centuries-old apprenticeship system underpinning organized pickpocketing has been disrupted. Pickpocketing has always perpetuated itself by having older hooks — nicknamed “Fagins,” after the crime boss in Oliver Twist — teach younger ones the art, and then absorbing them into canons. But due to ratcheted-up law enforcement measures, including heftier sentences (in some states, a pick, defined as theft from the body of another person and charged as a felony regardless of the amount taken) and better surveillance of hot spots and known pickpockets, that system has been dismantled.
This is not the case in Europe, where pickpocketing has been less of a priority for law enforcement and where professionals from countries like Bulgaria and Romania, each with storied traditions of pickpocketing, are able to travel more freely since their acceptance into the European Union in 2007, developing their organizations and plying their trade in tourist hot spots like Barcelona, Rome, and Prague. “The good thieves in Europe are generally 22 to 35,” says Bob Arno, a criminologist and consultant who travels the world posing as a victim to stay atop the latest pickpocketing techniques and works with law enforcement agencies to help them battle the crime. “In America they are dying off, or they had been apprehended so many times that it’s easier for law enforcement to track them and catch them.”