Absolute-negative utility crime

My phone got stolen, again. It was picked right out of my pocket as a massive crowd swarmed a bathroom area at Coachella last Sunday. At first, I wondered like last time if I might have dropped my phone or left it in a strange place. But I quickly realized that was unlikely. When I returned to the bathroom area, just moments after I had left and realized my phone was missing, others were talking about how their phones were gone. A thief was on the loose. I was annoyed, but there was no benefit to being upset. There was a slight chance someone had picked up my phone, which would soon have a lost message on its screen with a callback number, and return it to the lost and found. For that, I would have to wait. But I knew that most likely, my phone was gone for good. I find phone theft to be a particularly infuriating crime.

Theft of modern phones, especially iPhones, is of great frustration to the person who loses their phone and minimum benefit to the person who steals it. Within hours of my phone’s theft, I had it remotely reset and bricked by Apple by flagging it as stolen. Nobody can ever use that phone again, and most of its parts which are internally and digitally serialized will be unusable in another iPhone because Apple also blacklists those parts. Apple’s robust hardware lockdown allows them to strongly disincentive theft, but fools still steal them. Most stolen iPhones were valuable to those who owned them but became worthless to those who stole them. Committing crimes is wrong. Committing crimes that create great harm for the victims and little to no benefit to the thief is heinous. I am referring to this as an absolute-negative utility crime.

Net-negative utility is not a sufficient descriptor. This a far worse crime than that. Nobody wins and somebody loses. Not only is the net utility negative, but so is the absolute utility. I think all crime is bad but I have a particular distaste for this sort of crime. Perhaps at times, I feel like stupidity is the greatest evil, and to me, such crimes do seem quite stupid. I wish I could find and face the person who stole my phone. If they’re lucky, I won’t.