Like most big cities, pickpocketing and purse snatching is a bit of a problem in Chicago. In 2015, there were 2,291 reports of the two types of theft throughout the city, which is a little more than six per day. The highest concentration of reports are exactly where you'd expect: The Loop, River North and Lakeview. No neighborhood is immune to having its pockets picked or purses snatched, though. For a more detailed look at the problem, here's a map breaking down every such report last year.
The green dots denote reports of pickpocketing; the yellow ones denote purse snatching.
The arrest rate for these types of thefts is incredibly low
The data on pickpocketing and purse snatching reveals a few interesting things about the phenomenon in Chicago. For starters, it's incredibly easy to get away with picking a pocket or snatching a purse in the city. Of the 1,655 reports of pick-pocketing last year, just 32 led to an arrest, and of the 637 reports of purse-snatching, only 15 saw a suspect in cuffs. Altogether, that's a two percent arrest rate for the pair of crimes, so if someone grabs your phone out of your pocket, it's almost a sure bet that they won't have to reckon with the law for it.
Thieves love the CTA
More than a quarter of the reported pickpocketing and purse snatching thefts took place on trains, buses, platforms and other CTA property last year. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has witnessed some poor sap's iPhone get snatched on the train. But public transit isn't the only hotbed for thieves—20 percent of the reports of purse snatching and pickpocketing took place on sidewalks last year.
Is this really that big of a problem?
In the grand scheme of things, these types of crimes are a mere drop in the bucket when compared to the total number of thefts across town last year. Just four percent of the more than 57,000 reported thefts were for pickpocketing or purse snatching. But the strikingly low arrest rate is an outlier—the police had an arrest rate of more than 11 percent on overall thefts last year. Also, these figures don't include instances of theft that weren't reported, and if a pick-pocketer accomplishes their goal, the victim won't even know that their wallet was stolen.