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.
Why do you carry a knife in the first place?
Its a useful tool and carrying one is common practice in many parts of the US. I had it on me out of habit at the time and after this incident mostly stopped carrying one in public except when necessary.
Righto, but before going out you should be aware of the laws elsewhere.
Because it's a tool I use often during the day. I might open a package with it, scrape some gasket material off of some parts, whittle a stick, de-burr a piece of metal, cut an apple or sandwich. Bunches of uses. At 5:30am this morning, I cut open a package a bacon for my breakfast with it. Why don't you carry one?
If I don't have a pocket knife on me, I should probably go back home and put my pants on.........
I used to carry one, I thought <it's ought to be useful sometime>, and it could be. But most packets are easy to open ny hands, and utilty knives become become progressively less useful as you get used to the.
I was checking and checking granpa's garage, I found some two heavily used pocket knives in there. Rusted, shut. I restored the without losing that 'antique' patina. But I could never carry these. First they're illegal around here ~ and if you want to visit any EU city they're not things to have on yourself ~ secondly, they're less than ideal tools in many such cases. I like harvesting and hiking, and shears are safer to use. I understand a swiss knife, but that has limits too.
A general advice is that one of these knives can put you in dangerous situations, like the one yoy described..
You learned that in a crisis your mode is fight. Better than freeze and fawn for sure, flee is safer.
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.
Over here in nyc we dont really got pick pockets, if think it has to do with how the city for a while used to be really fucked up, and for those of us who grew up here having habits were we pay attention to what going on around us, making it harder to pick pocket. This only really applies to ny and maybe areas like it. Everything changed alot in the past 20 years.
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.
Nobody said anything about professionals until you came along. And you don't have to be the best. You just have to be enough. In fact nobody claimed anyone was the best until you came around. It seems like you just wanted an opportunity to insult Americans.
I literally am an American. I live amongst these mouth breathing knuckle dragging idiots daily. Trust me I know a little bit about how fucking stupid, vengeful, and thoughtless they are and how they all see themselves as an action hero in their own story that will somehow always come out on top.
I'm sure you blend in fine in the wild.
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.
That has not been my experience
There are way too many American cops operating on the notion that they have far fewer rules of engagement than we military servicemembers did in Afghanistan and Iraq. Human life in general appears to have very little value to them.
I do not recall ever meeting a similar police officer in Europe, I'm sure they probably exist, but are definitely far less common.
Being a vicious cold hearted murderous bastard doesn't necessarily depend upon their level of physical fitness
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.
The only reference that that I could find quickly googling, is the repost of repost of repost of some unspecified study that someone did, measuring readings from some unspecified fitness bracelet. Even if we assume it exists, even if we assume it measures correctly, even if we assume it's not an ad for something, it is a study about people health conscious enough to buy and regularly wear a fitness bracelet. And among this cohort, the average is just 3.2 km.
I agree, it's a bit more that 300 meters, but not by much actually.
I took the lowest end measurement of the worst cohort in the study, actually, and even then they did over ten times the amount of walking you claimed. That's not a 'bit' wrong, that's off by an entire order or magnitude. And for the record, the entire rest of your post is made up as well- the studies are easily available, the fitness bracelet was given to them, it clearly delineates what bracelets are used, and a wide variety of ages, sexes, occupations, etc etc were studied.
https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Fulltext/2010/10000/Pedometer_Measured_Physical_Activity_and_Health.4.aspx
The average american has never walked a meter in their whole life. We'll be dead in the cold cold ground before we measure distances in things easily divisible by 10.
Don't join the military then.
Yeah, that was a bad idea when the military members were being sacrificed to protect profits. It's worse now that they will be used to attack their fellow citizens at home.
I mean, yeah, good advice in general.
*citation needed
https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Fulltext/2010/10000/Pedometer_Measured_Physical_Activity_and_Health.4.aspx
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.
Nobody ever said anything about superhuman. Put the strawman away.
It's a literary device known as exaggeration for comedic effect. Fucking hell, what the discourse on the internet came to, should I start speaking trumpian now so brainfried crowd will understand? Double plus bigly ungood.
Yeah as an American myself, let me tell you: These people are dipshits, but there's enough of them to sway the discussion into both 1. It's totally valid to try to kill a person over petty theft and 2. They will definitely will win that fight every time. They have the most upvotes, so they must be right, right?? It couldn't be that they're collectively jackasses and Donald Trump represents their unrestrained fucking Id.
Again with the strawman. Nobody said anything about fighting every time time, and nobody especially has said anything about killing anyone. Maybe try reading what people say, instead of just responding to whatever you hallucinate them saying.
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.