They are taking our watches…

Are the numbers of thefts of luxury watches rising in our major cities? Are there knife or gun wielding gangs of immigrants making our streets less safe in which to wear a luxury watch? These are different questions. The answer to each might be “yes”, but it will be hard to obtain accurate statistics to support this answer. Most people default to their “experience”, and as a species we are not reliable reporters.

I know more about the United States than I do about any other country. It is difficult to extrapolate knowledge of New Orleans and say that Krakow will follow the same trends. Crime is individual to localities, regions, cities, and countries. It follows long trends and snapshots of narrow windows do not have much explanatory force. There are cultural, economic, and practical causes of crime.

For purposes of a definition of crime, let us limit it to theft, by force with a weapon or without, or by entering the dwelling of another in order to commit larceny. This restricts us to burglary and robbery. Adultery, homosexuality, drug possession, performing an opera without permission of the author and many other activities have been or are currently forbidden by local laws. It does not help to lump all “crime” together.

Is luxury watch theft up?

Our perception of crime is influenced by our experiences. Most of us will never be robbed at gunpoint. We have heard and read news stories, and we have acquaintances who have had experiences, but we are unlikely to have been victims. The perception of crime is influenced by how it is reported. “This is the fourth robbery of a Rolex in Philadelphia this year,” an imaginary headline might read. That sounds bad. That’s a lot of Rolex robberies in Philly. Or is it? What if there were twenty last year? Now that fourth robbery might be a success story of law enforcement. The news won’t report it that way. “If it bleeds, it leads,” has been the business model for news outlets since the beginning of news outlets. Every story involving the robbery of a watch is told from the most sensational angle possible.

An American football player gets shot for his watch, a billionaire and his wife are robbed leaving dinner, an industrialist is killed for his Hublot. These are individual stories that do not necessarily indicate a trend. I get push notifications on my phone from many local, national, and international news sources. The BBC will breathlessly tell me anytime a Tory MP says anything stupid. This is our interconnected world. I now have access to news everywhere. But a robbery in San Francisco has no relationship to one in Berlin. We can see a connection where none exists.  All news is now local news. It used to be that you had to read very deep into your local paper to get news from around the world, and even then, it was dated (“last month in Bangkok”). Now you don’t read the paper. An algorithm pushes the story to you because you have previously read a Guardian article on watch theft. Your reality is subtly different than the person who does not read articles about theft of watches. You have picked your own adventure.

When a local mayor or police chief laments that crime is up you can almost always be assured that there will follow a request for more funding. When they announce that homicides are down, without more, you can guess that burglaries and robberies are up. Crime statistics are manipulated by politics and always have been. You always have to dig a little deeper into the numbers.

Years ago, a local police agency came to me to help address a violent crime problem that they were having. Under our law the most serious form of burglary is one that happens at night or while armed with a weapon. This was a fairly affluent suburb. Many homeowners had refrigerators in their garages for soft drinks and beer. Local teens would break into the garages (or just enter though an open door) at night to steal beer. These crimes technically fit all of the elements of the most serious level of burglary. Except, in reality, it was just teens stealing beer, what should have been the lowest level of theft. The police changed the way that they charged these crimes and saw a significant decrease in violent burglaries as a result. The behavior was the same, but the statistics were different. All crime statistics are manipulated to some degree.

Violent crime, homicides and robberies, were more common statistically in pre-industrial cultures than they are today. Crime is a constant throughout time, across the globe. There never was a perfect time or culture. The world of 1550 or 870 would shock you no matter where you stood.  In modern times crime increased in the United States from roughly 1960 until the mid-1990’s.  Go back and look at the popular culture from the 1970’s and 1980’s and you will see a society struggling with lowered expectations. Serpico, The French Connection, Death Wish, and Robocop do not represent a content and untroubled populace. Some of the music has an edge too, Jim Carroll’s People Who Died comes to mind.

And then crime decreased, a little at first, and then a lot. Twenty years later violent crime was much further away from our immediate consciousness. There are many theories for the decrease in crime: lack of lead in consumer products, availability of abortion, tougher and smarter policing; more punitive sentencing. None of these theories answers all of the decrease. No real cause and effect can be found. The obvious answer is that there were many factors, each with a small effect, causing life to get better.

About five years ago crime started to go up again. It was not an even rise. In some places the homicide rate spiked. In others it was property crime like robbery and burglary. In some it was both. In some places one type went up while the other went down. Liberal mayors were blamed, because cities were the most affected and big city mayors are generally more liberal than their rural counterparts. You do get more of what you subsidize, and big cities subsidize behaviors, like drug use, that are linked to many sorts of crime. But like the decrease in crime decades earlier, a monocausal explanation does not seem to fit.

Well, if crime is up, is the robbery or burglary of watches up? (I have been taking a long time getting here.) Yes. It clearly is up. It is not just the prevalence of stories about it all over the world. It is not just perception.

During the pandemic, luxury watch prices spiked across the world. The press, having to fill space, wrote overwrought stories about the increase in watch prices, particularly Rolex prices. YouTube hucksters created “academies” to explain how to make millions flipping watches. And for a few years the hype was real.  Some lost souls still ask the “investment value” of certain brands as though that is a serious question. Persons who are inclined to steal usually know enough to target items that can easily be resold at top dollar. Luxury watches have always been stolen in burglaries, but now certain risk-taking robbers have decided to take them in street encounters. Thieves concentrating on valuable assets should not be controversial.

Can we prove that watch theft is up statistically? Probably not. The act of a burglary or robbery is usually counted by local police. The object of the theft is less likely to be recorded unless it is something like paintings at a museum. But if robbery and burglary are up in your area then you can assume that this affects watches proportionally.

But what of those gangs of knife wielding youths?

Oh, you mean those dirty foreigners? That’s the level of debate. It immediately has everyone calling the other a xenophobe, racist or someone who hates their own culture. In this debate there is more heat than light.

First of all, here in the United States we have very few knife wielding gangs. Knives are so inefficient, and we are efficient people. So, this is a U.K./European problem. Would you trade your knife problem for a gun problem? I didn’t think so. (I don’t think that most Americans would trade for a knife problem. That is the subject of a longer essay by someone smarter than me. Remember, if your inclination is to say, “dumb Americans and their guns”, even non-gun owning Americans are going get their ire up. We are all tribal.)

Most crime is committed by young men. That is across cultures and countries and across time. Most crime is committed by males between the ages of 15 and 24. We have a concept called “criminal menopause” by which we mean that if a man reaches his early thirties, even if he has previously engaged in criminal behavior, he will stop. There are outliers, of course. I just represented a man whose first criminal conviction was in 1973.

The recent history of immigration into the United States and Europe is one of immigration of a disproportionate number of young men, not families. Young men are employed at lower rates than the rest of the population. Unskilled workers are employed at lower rates than skilled workers. Across the world we have been transitioning to a more skilled workforce.

When you have an excess population of unemployed young men you will have more crime associated with them. This will be independent of country of origin, race, or religion. It is because they are young men. It is not racist to point it out.

Nor is it racist to point out that certain types of crime have cultural roots. But honor killings and acid attacks have nothing to do with the prevalence of robbery and burglary among any group. I can’t find any linkage in crimes involving watches to any immigrant or native group. One specific incident does not represent a trend among a population.

Here in the United States, you will hear a certain type of politician state with absolute certainty that “immigrants commit crime at a lower rate than native born.” You will hear it cited as “studies say.” Go try to find these “studies”. You can’t. You are being lied to. The crime rate among recent immigrants is slightly higher than native born and over time reaches rough parity. After several years it makes no sense to make any distinction between the two groups. It is just young men doing young men things. There is a legal disincentive for immigrants to commit crime: deportation. If you take away the threat of deportation you remove the disincentive. There are distinctions in crime rates among certain sub-populations in the United States. And no, it is not all about race. What it is about may require some cultural introspection.

Yes, crime involving watches is up, especially in our larger cities. No, it is not any specific group, other than unemployed young men, causing the uptick. The recent speculative bubble in watch prices has made the average thief more aware of their value. Be aware of your surroundings, but don’t let fear rob you of the joy of living. Watches, even luxury watches, are just things and robberies are still statistically rare. You are going to have to jettison your Daytona to ride your camel through the eye of a needle anyway.

(The Needle Gate of old Jerusalem. It kind of changes the imagery, doesn’t it.)