this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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In São Paulo it was a little mini-assault.
You'd get shoved from behind, maybe bumped into from the side, while yet another guy is actually taking your shit. Extra credit if you're at a curb so you stumble.
Then everybody splits, your instinct is to turn around to see the guy who shoved you, by the time you've done that and realized what happened, your shit is goooone.
What are they doing in Paris that the mark has a chance to grab them? I guess if you're in a reasonably athletic pack of 4-5, but at that point surely there are easier targets?
I suppose people who don't watch American sports don't appreciate that there are many obese Americans who can still run 40 yards in six seconds and expertly smash you into the ground when they get there.
I was almost pickpocketed in Paris when I was out late at night and stupid drunk to the point I was seeing double. I had sat down on the curb because standing wasn't great. They came up behind me and crouched down without me noticing until they made their move. I instantly went into fight mode and almost stabbed them. Super dumb but I was very drunk and it was just like instinct that they were trying to steal my knife so the only option was stab them in the face with it before they could use it to stab me. As soon as I got the knife back I had the blade open and they jumped back looking terrified like I was a wild animal about to attack, which is kind of what I felt like. Super weird experience. I think they were really just grabbing what they could and happened to get my knife instead of my wallet but being a drunk American my first instinct was kill or be killed.
In my city in the UK, there have been a lot of thefts recently where someone will grab a phone out of someone's hand and then escape on a moped or bike. Sometimes they start out on foot and hop on a vehicle, but sometimes it's a "drive by" pickpocketing, so to speak (though calling it pickpocketing feels a tad erroneous if there are no pockets involved).
In big European cities, a more subtle version of what you describe can be quite common. Like if a suspicious person bumps into you (in a manner that's fairly common in a big city), people who suspect that they have been pickpocketed may pat the pocket that their phone or wallet is in to check that things are still there. This is then observed by someone working with that first person, and they watch and wait for an opportunity to surreptitiously swoop in. When it happens, even if you immediately feel that you have been pickpocketed, it can be difficult to discern who it was.
I'm gonna go out on a fucking limb and say people playing professional sports are not representative of the average obese assholes who have to walk around with a fucking oxygen tank lmao.
Seriously, why do Americans all think they're the best fighters around? Is it too much television and action movies? You're in America, you really think an American pickpocket isn't going to be packing some kind of weapon and if they clock that they're being chased they are afraid to use it or something? I dunno, it seems to me the vast majority love just fantasizing about this while in reality they'd be bleeding out on the pavement before they had a chance to touch the person who swiped their shit.
Pretty sure they were talking about football players. Not really a fighting thing. That's literally half the game.
Football players still very often fail to actually tackle someone even when they try.
This isn't about standing up and doing axe kicks and shit, this is about chasing somebody down and getting the ball back from them.
I've personally chased somebody down who assumed they could outrun me because I was fat, ten years after the last time I played gridiron.
My knees were wobbly and I was a little lightheaded afterward, but it's the one athletic ability your stereotypical dumbass American will have. We'll literally break our own ankle trying to do a stepover. Or maybe that's just me. 😄
This assumes that you can do it perfectly every time, not that you'll sometimes be outclassed by someone who is actually in shape, actually faster than you, or has better control over their motor skills and can dodge or jump to escape you. Your little anecdote about the one time you tackled someone without breaking your body trying to do it doesn't prove anything.
Sure.
I totally agree that absolutely anybody with current training in anything would have made me pay dearly for my stupidity.
However, because I'm a random American who played football, I was the one with the scintilla more experience, and I got to keep my teeth.
The American dudes who played sports in high school and are now in their 20s and 30s haven't had their health collapse yet.
European cops are way more intimidating than American cops, by and large. I'm not trying to be jingoistic, I'm just saying that running after someone who is carrying something is the version of the national sport the vast majority of us actually play.
Your national sport is walking from office to a car to drive home to sit on a couch. Average American walks three hundred meters per week, the second you stop training for the sport you played once a week as a child 10 years ago, you stop being able to run any reasonable distance.
I guess another national sport of yours is overestimating how strong and powerful you actually are.
The average american walks about 2 miles a day. 22km a week is definitely not 300 meters.
I think what you're missing is that waaay more Americans than you think played sports as a kid (well over 60% of the population iirc), and still know how to tackle someone. Football is huge here, and baseball can get pretty nasty too (source: other kids would see the armor and think 'well if I can knock the ball out of his glove I'm safe!')
Yes, there are a lot of obese assholes, but it turns out lugging around an extra 100lb of weight is actually pretty good strength training for the legs. Yes, they're going to be gassed nigh instantly because their cardio is shit, but they're probably fast off the mark and weigh enough that just running into you will slam you into the ground pretty badly.
Weight classes exist for a reason, and most Americans are going to be in a much higher weight class than the average pickpocket. Absent any weapons, as long as they can catch them, the American has a decent chance of winning, statistically speaking. Paris pickpockets found that out to their detriment.
Reading shit like this, I am no longer surprised so many Americans think they can overpower an elephant and outrun a bear. Yeah, buddy, the fact that you occasionally run on a field as a child, 20 years and 100 kilos ago, makes you superhuman now. I
Nobody ever said anything about superhuman. Put the strawman away.
This all continues to rely on an erroneous set of thinking that because you're the victimized party that automatically you will come out on top. It assumes that the pickpocket isn't in any way considering that they might need to deal with someone catching them in the act, and that they won't have a knife or a gun that they could pull far faster than some obese fuckwit can run them down. It also assumes that "they still know how to tackle someone" even matters. Plenty of people "know how to tackle someone" in professional football and still fail to do it regularly because their opponent is either faster than them, stronger than them, or more agile and can dodge. Every single suggestion from my fellow Americans in this thread rests upon faulty assumptions that the other party is somehow unable to defend themselves or is unable to escape a tackle. It's fucking absurd. Everyone in this country thinks they are fucking John fucking McClane. Well yippee ki-yay motherfucker, guess what none of you are.
None of that was an assumption I made, and I also very clearly stated that all of what I said was absent a weapon, like the knife you're referring to.
Pickpockets typically aren't trying to run, because that's INCREDIBLY suspicious, they're trying to slink away, and they certainly aren't trying to slip or break a tackle that they probably don't even see coming- again, they're not going to be staring at the person they just pickpocketed.
Nobody is trying to pretend Americans are john mcclane. I'm simply pointing out a possible explanation for what has already happened. You can argue all you want, but the fact is, american tourists regularly do catch and win against pickpockets. That's literally the entire point of this lemmy post.
It's not going to be a MMA fight between an american and a pickpocket, except the american has to run down and catch the sprinting pickpocketer first, it's probably going to be some 250lb dude wheezing for breath blindsiding him out of nowhere in something that is more accurately described a high-speed trip into inadvertent body slam, but it's still gonna work.
I'm gonna need a lot more evidence than a single article posted on... *checks notes... medium.com, a site where literally anyone can post a story.
It was a Whole Thing on tiktok, with people filming the altercations/aftermath, to the point of where it became a meme and trended during the olympics.