I wonder about this too sometimes -- why don't more bags get stolen from baggage claim at the airport? It's totally unsecured, and one could, if caught, even plausibly claim to have made a mistake.
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Underexploited Crime Opportunities
24 Aug 2007 10:17 am
Comments (8)
Chad: presumably the same person who stole several pairs of my pants from the dryer at my neighborhood laundromat last year. Heroin's cheap.
I actually caught a guy trying to do just that with one of my bags about 10 years ago when I was returning to Seattle from a research deployment on the Bering Sea. I had a big green duffel bag and as I was walking into the baggage claim area in SeaTac I saw my bag walking away on the shoulder of some fisherman. I grabbed him and said "you sure that's your bag?" He looked startled, dropped the bag in front of me. I grabbed the tag and showed him my name. He got all defensive when I glared at him and said "OK hey, honest mistake..sorry" and walked away. It always felt like he was trying to steal the bag but what do you say. Besides, all I had in there was dirty grubby laundry from 3 months of cutting up fish on the deck of a research ship.
Here in the US I rarely ever see any sort of security in baggage claim areas. Well, there are video cameras everywhere so presumably if you had a stolen bag they could find video of the thief taking it. But since most bags are actually lost not stolen the first assumption of most passengers and airline staff is that the bag was lost not stolen so who's ever going to look at the tape unless they had a rash of thefts and knew about it.
Some terminals are secured to the extent that only passengers with tickets can get into them, but I never see them cross checking bags against claim stubs. That is not a complicated thing to do. When you fly into any Brazilian airport the baggage claim areas are completely secured and as you exit there is a security guard that checks every bag's tag against every passenger's baggage claim stubs. You don't have the claim stub you get shuttled off to the side where they check your ID and verify that the bags are actually yours.
I suspect the reason that most American airports don't do this is because their terminal design puts the baggage claim outside the secure parts of the airport and to secure the baggage claim areas would take lots of expensive construction and re-design to move walls around, etc. It's probably cheaper for the airlines to just pay the minimal claim on every stolen bag than to pay to re-design baggage claim areas and pay for staff to check bag tags against claim stubs.
In thinking about this, I think the sophisticated way to steal bags would be to have a team spread between two cities that serve business travelers. You have a team on one end watching bags being checked and by profiling the passengers doing the checking they ID the bags most likely to have valuables, or at least expensive clothes. Then the team at the other end waits for and grabs the bags they have pre-identified. With cell phones they could take photos of both the target bags and passenger so the team at the other end knows which bags to grab and also which passenger to avoid. It would be much easier to steal someone's bag if you know who it is you are stealing from so you can avoid them in the claim area, or have a partner distract them or shield you when the theft occurs.
There are probably much easier ways to steal things. But if I was trying to steal luggage, that's how I'd do it.
They do this in Colombia.
Matt,
Time for you to take a holiday. Enough with Krugman, already, you're not even functioning. Go to one of those Mexican places where all the secretaries get drunk, smoke dope and fuck the locals. Get back in touch with reality.
Baggage gets stolen outside the RichZone(tm) all the time. Within North America, Europe and Japan, any thief knows it's dirty laundry.
They rob you on the cab-fare into town.
Actually, the few times I've flown, I believe in at least some airports I did have an airport or airline employee checking baggage claim tags. And there's usually a porter around, of course.
The problem for any thief is that there is tons of baggage, and impossible to tell which one is valuable. Why risk arrest for something that may be worthless? It's not like homeless people needing clothes hang out at the airport...
I think you'd probably find more bags being stolen BEFORE check-in than at checkout. It's easier to spot the more valuable stuff - laptop cases and the like - and easier to stroll by and pick them up and walk out since there's more of a crowd and not everyone is eyeballing for their bags.
Also, in many cases, at the baggage pickup, the bags are late arriving, so the passengers are already there watching for their bags. So why risk getting in a fight by grabbing a bag that's not yours when the owner may well be watching you do it?
The way to steal baggage is to get a job handling or checking the baggage at the airport.
For instance, guns have been stolen from O'Hare:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4155/is_20060818/ai_n16643162
Comments closed September 07, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Because everyone puts their valuable stuff in carryon. I mean, who would want to steal someone's spare vacation clothes?
Posted by Chad Okere | August 24, 2007 7:51 PM