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Conversely, if someone smashes into my parked car and flees, most major cities won’t investigate. Whereas they could use stop light cameras and a few hours of w

• blacksmith_tb 7y ago
  Isn't that just a cost/benefit calculation? How many projects have you worked on where someone suggested spending X hours on something only to have it shot down for minimal ROI? Obviously it matters more to you personally, and you'd like to have a sense that "justice is done" but really it's just an insurance claim. Of course it's also frustrating if the thief has only gotten some random junk out of your car - if it wouldn't lead to endless extortion I personally would be happy to hand him or her $10 to not break my window, even if there's no deductible, just to spare me dealing with it.
  • marcoperaza 7y ago
    There is an intangible to living in a place where cars are regularly broken into vs. living in a place where they aren't. Think of the kinds of attitudes that people develop towards others in the two places. Trust vs. distrust, comfort vs. unease, open vs. closed. There's also the second-order effects of having a class of people going around committing those kinds of crimes with impunity. Many become emboldened and move on to other malfeasance. Order breeds order and chaos breeds chaos.
    • birken 7y ago
      > Many become emboldened and move on to other malfeasance. Order breeds order and chaos breeds chaos. Why does SF have a sizable increase in property crimes over the past 10 years but a drop in violent crimes? I'd imagine if chaos did truly beget chaos, then rates of crime across the board would be going up.
    • patcon 7y ago
      Your words bring to mind my experience with gentrification in a few cities: one person's order is another person's chaos. If you ask a longterm resident in a gentrifying neighborhood how they feel about what the new developments are doing to their social fabric, you might find your simple truism gets wierded <3 It's often that crimes restore lost order and stability for some people. Not saying it's moral on one side or the other, but it certainly doesn't feel like a neat little package.
      • baddox 7y ago
        I know that moral philosophy is a complex matter, but I should hope we can agree that being upset that your car was broken into is significantly different than being upset that there’s a hip coffee shop in your neighborhood.
        • thatcat 7y ago
          I think its that not affording rent leads to higher demand for crime.
    • lonelappde 7y ago
      Living in a place with breakins is fine for people who don't have expensive things lying around.
      • susijdjdjxa 7y ago
        The thieves don’t leave crappy old cars alone.
    • rapnie 7y ago
      So true. Reminded me of Swiss towns in the Alps where houses, bikes in the shopping street and cars in general are unlocked. Really refreshing and makes you feel safe. The bigger risk to a car is when it is locked and the lock mechanism freezes over.
      • alchemism 7y ago
        At the far other extreme of the spectrum, in blighted urban neighborhoods, everyone also leaves their cars unlocked. If you let the junkies inspect the contents of your car freely, they won't smash the windows to do it.
  • tomcooks 7y ago
    Unlike company, law is equal to everyone. I respect the law, and the lawmakers should work for me. The ROI calculations are to be budgeted and accounted for, otherwise why am I being taxed?
    • derefr 7y ago
      Laws and budgets are set on different time-scales; there is never 100% alignment between the cost of enforcing the law and the availability of the budget required. In fact, most of the time, there's very little alignment, because there's no incentive to have those things be aligned. Sometimes even disincentive: there are laws on the books nobody wants enforced, and a culture in policing of enforcing the letter of the law, not the spirit—but one can always choose to not enforce a law one doesn't agree with by just making an informal agreement that certain crimes (of basically equal severity) take enforcement priority, such that those crimes nobody sees as crimes just get "de-prioritized" to the point that they're never enforced at all.
    • bilbo0s 7y ago
      >law is equal to everyone I understand the goal of this sentiment, but this is not how most societies work. Equality under the law is the proper ideal, but it's not at all how things work. There are a lot of reasons for that, from bias to lack of resources. But whatever the particular reason may be, most people only notice and complain about inequality when they are its losing side. Make no mistake about it though, from the police at the bottom of the stack, all the way up to how the judges rule on cases at the top of the stack, the legal system has never been equitable.
    • baroffoos 7y ago
      No, the law does not and should not use maximum resources for everyone. It is clearly beneficial to not send whole teams of people looking for weeks for your stolen wallet like they would for a missing person. >The ROI calculations are to be budgeted and accounted for Often this would require you to pay more in tax than the value you would get back from it. Are you ok paying $1000 to track down the person who smashed your window when you will likely never get any money from them or will you just pay the $100 it costs to get a new window which doesn't happen very often.
  • paulsutter 7y ago
    San Francisco has about 30,000 car breakins per year, largely because there is no enforcement. How much does that cost?
    • lightbendover 7y ago
      This is a great boon to the repair shops of San Francisco and I cannot for the life of me think of a parable that would indicate insidious downsides.
      • newnewpdro 7y ago
        For those reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
    • lonelappde 7y ago
      How much is the cost of a break-in?
      • vel0city 7y ago
        Truly spitballing an answer to this. A car window replacement is probably a few hundred bucks ($200-500), I imagine there are some instances with some really high value (greater than $1k USD, think a laptop) takes but there's also probably a ton of small hauls (loose change, stereo) or unsuccessful takes. I'd guess the average probably couldn't be more than a thousand bucks a break in, on average. This means this back of the napkin math puts car break-ins in that area costing probably not more than $30M, not including some insurance overheads and what not. So judging by off the napkin math on costs and optimistically assuming stronger enforcement would lead to 50% less car break ins, if strong enforcement costs more than $15 million is it worth it? When does the cost of enforcement become inconsequential to the results? A good question to debate on either side IMO.
        • kelnos 7y ago
          Even if a single police officer costs $1M a year all-in (which I'm significantly high-balling, I hope), I imagine 15 police officers hired specifically to work on car break-in cases would make a huge dent. The car thieves keep doing what they're doing because they know the police won't track them down. Even some minor efforts to start tracking them down could act as a powerful deterrent. That's not really the point, though. It's not just a simple monetary calculation. Even if the true value of repairs and stolen items was $30M, I would allocate several times that of taxpayer money just for the quality of life benefits, assuming it would do some good.
  • testis321 7y ago
    Problem here is, if person #1 can do something, and gets away with it, then person #2 does that, and gets away with it, many more people will do the same. Spending more on the crimes with negative ROI, makes the total ROI higher because it acts as a deterrent for future would-be criminals. Reddit was full of video of really trashy kids, driving their bicycles through malls and stores harrassing random people there, and "nobody could do anything" about them. If those kids were arrasted, sent to juvie, given community service (or maybe even just shown on tv crying in court, instead of acting all badass on their bikes), that would sure stop many others from repeating what they did.
  • colejohnson66 7y ago
    There’s many things wrong with the US and police, but a big one is this; The cops shouldn’t be doing cost/benefit analysis; They should be prosecuting every crime they feel they can win (have enough evidence for).
• patcon 7y ago
  Oy. If we're going to deploy scary tech against criminal behavior, let's pls not rally for it to be used for petty crime committed by desperate ppl. If our liberties are getting flayed, let's at least see it used against ppl at the top -- suspected inside traders, etc. At least that way we'll get the powerful backlash and safeguards we all deserve ;) Of course all of this feels gross, but as someone who was homeless in SF for a bit, going after people on the outs feels really backward.
  • x86_64Ubuntu 7y ago
    Yes, but real crime in the US is relatively rare. So folks are going to go from real crime to "crimes of people whose existence annoys me".
    • homonculus1 7y ago
      That's a really unfair characterization of people's anger at getting their property stolen and destroyed.
• delfinom 7y ago
  Stop light cameras do not record contiounsly. And cities often have no access to them as they are run by third party companies that get a cut of the tickets they issue on the cities behalf (complete with city paying them if they don't get enough tickets to write) They only need the relevant clip for the ticket.
• droithomme 7y ago
  > if someone smashes into my parked car and flees, most major cities won’t investigate I've had three home break in and robberies. In no case would the police even show up to take a report. In the case where my cameras identified the perps and I tracked down and documented them trying to fence my property, and worked with other neighbors to document an actual crime syndicate that was taking orders for specific things to steal, the police would do absolutely nothing. Police are about collecting fees from "in" drug dealers in return for looking the other way, while protecting their turf against incursion from rival drug gangs. They are also involved, along with judges in the USA, with child sex trafficking. The idea we need to give up freedom and be surveilled by these people is unrealistic.
• brian_cunnie 7y ago
  It's not that the police _won't_ investigate; it's that the punishment isn't enough deterrent. "We can only give them a citation, and the thieves know that, so they don't care," said officer Pete McLaughlin (retired) to me. Admittedly, this was in regards to stealing bikes and not into breaking cars, but I suspect the punishment is the same.
• raxxorrax 7y ago
  I just recently got my window smacked in a mid size city. Was very pricey, but I wouldn't want to give my state permanent location data in exchange for the possibility of catching some random perpetrators. On the contrary, I would perhaps become a criminal because I would try to smash the cameras to protect my privacy. Surveillance still is one of the most uncreative and probably also one of the worst forms of crime prevention/reduction.
  • MertsA 7y ago
    I think you're missing the point of the parent comment. They aren't suggesting more surveillance, they're pointing out that right now the status quo is that even when there's already surveillance footage that could be used to identify a suspect, all too often the police can't be bothered to do any "good old fashioned police work". We don't need draconian surveillance measures enacted to solve this type of crime. We need police resources to actually follow up and prosecute petty theft for all victims, not just corporations and celebrities. A couple of years ago my father was involved in a hit and run when a man in a red late model corvette turned out of a small subdivision right in front of traffic. This was during morning rush hour on a weekday, there's only about a dozen houses on that road, and only one red late model corvette parked in the driveway of one of those houses. That single red corvette was also parked with a car cover on it afterwards. Even though there were numerous witnesses to the hit and run given that it was during morning rush hour traffic, and even though it is pretty obvious what happened and there are plenty of ways to get evidence to support it, the police couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. As far as I know, they didn't even so much as question him about the hit and run. We're currently paying the privacy tax with existing surveillance yet people like you and me cannot benefit from that surveillance.