Laptop grabs keep users on edge
There’s a growing wariness among the students, graduates and workers who hunch over steaming cups of artisanal coffee and glowing laptop computer screens at Bay Area cafes.
Their Macbooks and Dells have become prime targets for coffee-shop bandits who strike day or night, often in groups, and flee in mere seconds, motivated by a black market hungry for laptops that can be scrubbed of data and shipped overseas.
Tragedies like the death
of an Oakland engineer who was killed New Year’s Eve chasing men who police say grabbed his laptop at a Starbucks are never far from their minds.
“I’m a lot more aware of it,” Danny Nuch, 23, a San Jose State computer engineering graduate student, said as he worked on his Dell over a coffee at Philz near campus. He makes sure not to leave his laptop unattended, even taking it with him to the restroom if a friend isn’t with him to watch it. “This is super precious to me.”
The recent Oakland robbery was one of several brazen thefts at Bay Area cafes, restaurants and other public places that have laptop owners on edge. Some have been captured on video, including one Nov. 6 at a San Jose Paris Baguette and one in June 2018 at Berkeley’s Caffe Strada.
Hundreds of angry and worried Oakland residents packed a public safety meeting near the Starbucks struck on New Year’s Eve, where Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’malley conceded that such thefts are “happening way too often.”
It’s hard to say whether laptop thefts are on the rise because they don’t fit neatly into the broad crime categories law enforcement agencies track and report each year to the FBI. They could be recorded as robberies if the computers are forcibly taken from their owners, or as thefts if they are swiped while unattended or in a smash-and-grab from a car.
But law enforcement officials say stolen laptops have been a hot commodity on the black market and a top target in auto burglaries, which have risen in much of the Bay Area, in part because computers are more likely to be left in a car than a cellphone, purse or wallet.
“Unfortunately, it’s so easy to take a laptop, and so easy to flip it,” said Santa Clara County Deputy District
Attorney Marisa Mckeown. “They can get a couple hundred dollars cash for each.”
While the thieves will take anything they can get, Mckeown said, the newer the better, and they are particularly keen on Apple.
The black market also spurs the laptop grabs at cafes, even though those crimes are riskier — thieves are more likely to be fought or detained by the owner and bystanders, the crime is more likely to be captured by security and private cellphone cameras, and the penalties can be more severe. If the victim resists the theft, which police don’t advise, it can be charged as robbery, a violent felony.
While veteran police officers will say privately that recent California laws aimed at easing prison overcrowding by reducing consequences for nonviolent crimes have emboldened thieves, they concede statistics don’t show that. California Department of Justice records show statewide rates for robbery, property crimes generally and larceny theft have fallen since 2012, when voters relaxed California’s Three Strikes law.
For the Bay Area’s three biggest cities, rates since 2014, when Proposition 47 turned some nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors, show a mixed picture.
Oakland’s robbery and property crime rates have fallen but remain high, while larceny has gone up. San Francisco robbery rates fell, but property crime and larceny rose. San Jose has seen all three rise, but the rates are lower than in San Francisco and Oakland. BART saw electronic device thefts and robberies jump 45% in 2019, but those mostly involve cellphones.
Brad Van Gemert, sales director at STOP, a Connecticut company specializing in laptop theft prevention, said he hasn’t seen a significant change nationally in laptop theft rates, though he said they make the news more thanks to cellphone video and social media. Business travelers and students, he said, are often prime targets.
UC Berkeley advises students to be wary of laptop thieves and has sporadically sent its police officers undercover to nearby cafes to thwart robbers. But UC Berkeley police communications and records supervisor Tyrone L. Morrison said he hasn’t noticed much change in laptop thefts.
If anything, there seem to be fewer. San Jose State police Capt. Frank Belcastro said officers have done more outreach to students over the past year and seen laptop thefts drop 27% to 27 in 2019.
Cafe customers like Nuch, meanwhile, keep their eyes out. He likes to work at Philz because he’s heard of thefts at the university library, and the cafe is popular with police officers who patrol downtown.
Brittani Medeiros, 25, who was working on her laptop nearby at Philz, said she knows people who have had their laptops taken from their cars.
“I’m always aware,” Medeiros said. “My laptop is my work.”
In Berkeley, Anushree Gupte, 19, a UC Berkeley sophomore, loves to work on her laptop at Caffe Strada, where a 2018 theft was caught on video. She takes the usual precautions, sitting so she can’t be surprised from behind, but believes avoiding thieves is “just a lot of luck.” She knows friends who were robbed at a Berkeley Peet’s who “did nothing wrong.”
Bay Area police and prosecutors are trying to combat the problem by going after the black-market buyers, or “fences,” who pay cash for the stolen electronics. A 2018 “Million Dollar Baby” operation by Fremont police and Santa Clara County prosecutors broke up what they called a massive laptop computer theft ring responsible for hundreds of car burglaries in the region. The stolen laptops were being sent to Vietnam.
“There are fences throughout the Bay Area,” said Fremont police Lt. Mike Tegner, who worked on that operation. “Where the money’s being made is shipping it out of the United States. They are able to wipe the computers and restart them in other countries. That’s what’s driving the crime.”