Dear Editor,
I am upset but not surprised at the death of Sheema Mangar, the Demerara Bank employee who lost her life at the hands of a cell-phone thief. My sympathy goes out to her family and friends.
Guyanese need to stop treating cell-phone theft as if it is a small crime. When someone loses a cell phone as a result of theft the police and cell-phone carrier should collaborate to try and recover the phone and prosecute the perpetrator. Thieves just don’t wake up one morning and decide they are going to rob a family or household. They gain considerable experience in petty crime before they move on to bigger crimes. I am pretty sure that if someone carried out an investigation to determine the total value of handsets stolen on a yearly basis the number would be startling.
If someone loses his/her phone, especially a GSM smart phone, the carrier’s response when it is reported is that they will turn off their SIM so the thief cannot use it. A SIM is $500 and an average smart phone is $50,000. I am not a genius, but tell me if the cell-phone stealing business is not profitable? I honestly thought that with better technology we should be able to track a GPRS smart phone. What use is it to the person if he/she purchases an expensive smart phone from a carrier only to be told that they cannot help when someone steals it? The manufacturers are making the handsets so that every one is unique, whether it is the series number or PIN number. Carriers should stop telling their customers when they report their handset stolen that all they can do in this day and age is turn off the SIM.
When phone carriers operate in this manner they are indirectly encouraging criminal behaviour. If a thief knows that the cell-phone carrier will track and locate a stolen handset and report their findings to the police, criminals will think twice before stealing someone’s handset.
In closing, I would like to see more done by the relevant authorities to discourage the kind of behaviour that can result in the loss of innocent lives. My prayers go out to the family of Sheema Mangar.
Yours faithfully,
Andrew Hercules
