Apple may be responsible for the recent crime spikes in San Francisco

Crime is at a five-year high in San Francisco, and police are attributing the double-digit jump in thefts and robberies to a couple of usual suspects: smartphones and BART. A total of 45,927 crimes were reported to San Francisco police through the end of October, according to the Police Department’s CompStat database. That’s the most crimes reported since CompStat began tracking criminal activity in 2009.

There are different ways to measure the success of a tech company — thing like how many lucrative patents it’s sitting on, how much money it’s giving back to shareholders, and what its overall market penetration is in whatever area it’s operating in. Well, there’s another way also: how much do its product launches correlate with a spike rates. You can keep your reports about Apple’s recent financial quarters disappointing Wall Street analysts — as far as San Francisco’s criminal element is concerned, Apple is doing better than it has in years.