With about 1.6 million Americans having experienced violent phone thefts in 2012, law enforcement officials have taken two steps forward to combat the situation.

Top law enforcement officials in the two biggest markets for smartphone thefts in the U.S., San Francisco and New York City, will meet with representatives from Apple Inc., Google Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Microsoft Corp. next week in what is called a Smartphone Summit.

Essentially, the San Francisco district attorney and New York's attorney general want the top four phone makers to create and put in place a technological fix or "kill switches" on their mobile devices to turn them efficiently inoperable once stolen.

"This has become a national epidemic," San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon said in a statement. "Unlike other types of crimes, smartphone theft can be eradicated with a simple technological solution."

Mr Gascon strongly believed smartphone theft can be eradicated with a simple technological solution.

In 2012, Mr Gascon noted that 50 per cent of all robberies in San Francisco involved a mobile communications device. In Los Angeles it was 30 per cent. But most notably was "we've started to see some violence."

The growing violent street crimes involving smartphone theft have actually become household famous that law enforcement officials have labeled them 'Apple Picking,' although the term does not only correlated to Apple's iPhone brand. After stealing the devices, the thieves wipe clean the devices' memories and then resell them on the secondary market for hundreds of dollars.

"The theft of handheld devices is the fastest-growing street crime, and increasingly, incidents are turning violent," New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said. "It's time for manufacturers to be as innovative in solving this problem as they have been in designing devices that have reshaped how we live."

In the first nine months of 2012 alone, based on NYPD records, 11,447 iOS devices were stolen in the Big Apple, an increase of 40 per cent over the same period in 2011.