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Roughly in the same timeline, porch pirates have been rampant in my community (in the SF Bay Area nevertheless!) and causing a lot of headache for me and my nei

Roughly in the same timeline, porch pirates have been rampant in my community (in the SF Bay Area nevertheless!) and causing a lot of headache for me and my neighbors (at least those in our chat group). It seems to me that these CRIMINALS face little to no consequences here, both absolute and relative to the damage they are causing. The so-called police is willing and capable to do exactly nothing about it. Any confrontation either hurts the resident, or puts the (otherwise perfectly legal) resident under legal trouble... Which is weird, because this effectively means that the victim faces more risk than even the perpetrator, just by the virtue of having an address and living a proper, productive life! In the end I can't help but feel they are the predator and we are the prey. And the rest of the society is, uh, pretty content with the status quo? BTW: Would the Singapore system ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore ), properly enforced, act as a credible deterrence?

77777 6y ago
Didn't expect that last line ("BTW") but to be honest, I think something like that is the only solution. If you look at society 400-500 years ago, brutal punishment of this variety was the norm: theft in Restoration England was often enough met with hanging. Since then, the penalties for theft and other "petty" crimes have been reduced, to the point that now theft has been completely normalized. People complained, for example, when charges against Amy Cooper were dropped in New York, but the fact is that you can get arrested hundreds of times in New York, and your charges will always be dropped, for basically any charge, theft, assault, domestic violence, you name it, they drop it. There is a total unwillingness by people in power to inflict punishment on people who punish ordinary citizens by committing crimes against them, sending the signal committing crime is not at all, in fact, criminal, but normal, expected and acceptable behavior. Non-criminal people will flee such environments en masse or become criminals themselves. The result will be lawless cities that blowhards like Trump talk about but do nothing to fix, and only make worse. I am not saying we should go back to hanging people for theft. But we do need to figure out how to punish people without maintaining the Prison Industrial Complex. We need to figure out what is a crime (theft) and not a crime (drug use), we need to provide social services, food, shelter to poor people. We MUST provide education and opportunities to people. But if crime goes unpunished, perhaps in an asymmetric manner like caning, the lawlessness we're seeing today will grow much, much worse and make basic life unlivable in places that were once and still maybe are the pinnacles of civilization, like New York. It will destroy us.
- capnrefsmmat 6y ago
  It's hard to square this comment with the simple fact that property crime is, in the United States, currently much less common than it has been in decades. For example, household burglary dropped 56% from 1994 to 2011. https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4657 https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4657 Theft and motor vehicle theft have had similar major drops (figures 10 and 11): https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mpcncvs.pdf https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mpcncvs.pdf This data is from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which directly asks respondents if they have been the victim of a crime, and is not based on police reports or prosecutions. The same decline has also been seen in violent crime, and is actually one of the major unanswered questions in modern criminology: why has crime declined by about half since 1990? There are many theories (you've probably seen the theories involving lead or pollution exposure) but no definitive answers. But whatever the explanation may be, it does not justify brutal punishment, since (a) crime is declining, not increasing, and (b) I'm not aware of any substantial evidence showing a major deterrent effect of severe prison sentences or even capital punishment.
  - 77777 6y ago
    You may very well have statistics, but these statistics may very well be false, especially when it comes to including figures that represent quality of life (i.e. how anxious you are on a constant basis with respect to your property or being assaulted). Yes, home burglaries are usually reported and tracked in data. But, as it says in this very New York Times article, package theft goes completely unreported and is therefore not part of your statistics. Likewise, sexual assaults in subways are only very recently being tracked in New York. Why did you choose, by the way, to assume I was only talking about property crime? The types of crimes not tracked by NYPD is vast, and such crime I have seen escalating year over year. Stats are stats, but if you live in New York, you notice how 10 years ago people didn't rob Walgreens, and now they rob it all the time practically on an on-going basis. You just take what you need and walk past "security." See some boxes inside a vestibule? They're yours. But it's not just property crime, it's all crime.
    - capnrefsmmat 6y ago
monadic5 6y ago
My advice: lobby for stronger personal stimulus from congress. It's hardly a mystery why this is happening. Also if you think you're being preyed upon: you're hanging out on a forum with millionaires. This forum is far more predatory than porch theft ever could be. It's only a quirk of fate that our grift is legal and theirs is not.
filereaper 6y ago
Lived in Singapore, Caning is absolutely barbaric and an atrocious way of punishment. They have special people who are trained in caning and the culprit will get their 30 lashes or whatever regardless of whether they pass out at lash 19 say. They'll heal you up and back you go for the next 11 lashes. This is what they did in medieval times, not today. Singapore is barbaric in this aspect and this is enforced in middle schools as well. It turns kids into obedient robots. Whatever solution is proposed, caning is not one of them.
- avs733 6y ago
  the conversation on this thread is bizarre and concerning. It's stuff...it's literally stuff! The lead example is a blazer... That commenters are willing to permanently disfigure people because their blazer, or table leg is taken speaks to a lack of seeing others as human. I somehow think their would be an entirely different conversation about appropriate punishment if the article was about fraud or misconduct by the landlords, or centered the article on the landlords not providing reasonable service. my last apartment complex had universal package delivery lockers as a service. This is a totally solvable problem, the landlords are just cheap and as a result lets beat people. The other comment thread of 'you may well have your statistics but I have an opinion and anecdotes' is just exemplary of why this country has the justice system it does.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    Apparently violence is the only language they have ever known. The commentators, that is.
  - totalZero 6y ago
    Theft isn't a crime against stuff, it's a crime against the person whose stuff was taken. Stuff represents plans (supplies), freedom (means of transport), abilities (tools), and connections (devices). Your mentality legitimizes crime.
  - smilekzs 6y ago
    Your quote is not literal. Here is the more relevant literal quotes: """ You may very well have statistics, but these statistics may very well be false, especially when it comes to including figures that represent quality of life (i.e. how anxious you are on a constant basis with respect to your property or being assaulted). ... But, as it says in this very New York Times article, package theft goes completely unreported and is therefore not part of your statistics. Likewise, sexual assaults in subways are only very recently being tracked in New York. """
barbacoa 6y ago
By contrast, in Texas the law allows you to use lethal force to protect your property. You can literally shoot someone in the back as they run away with your amazon package if you have no other reasonable way to prevent your property from theft. https://www.shouselaw.com/tx/crimes/defenses/self-defense/ https://www.shouselaw.com/tx/crimes/defenses/self-defense/
- avs733 6y ago
  well good, we wouldn't want you to be without your nice gray women's blazer...that thief's family be damned!
  - barbacoa 6y ago
    There have been some pretty outlandish example of this law over the years. https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/jilted-john-acquitted-texas-prostitute-death-article-1.1365975 https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/jilted-john-acquitted... Crazy how big of a difference in laws there are across the states.
  - 29083011397778 6y ago
    I'd assume your point would be dramatically more sympathetic if you used the term "Implied thief" - while theft is wrong, turning residents into judge, jury, and executioner sounds insane to me. I wouldn't even expect this to be limited to the truly insane citizens of Texas - simply an aggressive one that doesn't see their package and sees you leaving with what must (in their mind) be their property
- BrandoElFollito 6y ago
  It is not clear to me whether this includes the case of squatters. You comme back home after 2 weeks away and find your house occupied - can you use force to remove them from your property?
hshshs2 6y ago
why do you think petty theft warrants state administered violence?
estaseuropano 6y ago
I don't understand this kind of perspective. You ate completely olivipus to the root of the problem: why would mail carriers even leave parcels on the porch or similar? In most (all?) European countries the rule is that they ring the bell, if you don't answer they leave a note and either leave it with a neighbour, come back a day later, or you have to pick it up from the post office. In addition nowadays you can ask to get mail delivered to a specific kind of locker (operated by the mail service) where you can pick it up any time of day. Really, such a weird perspective to want to reintroduce capital punishment rather than force the companies to use one of the many available solutions. You have accepted that the legal burden is on you, rather than the carrier paid to get the package to you - which is just absurd.
- steve_g 6y ago
  In English, the term for caning would be "corporal" punishment. Capital punishment is the death penalty. Corporal means pertaining to the physical body.
himinlomax 6y ago
Why invoke caning when you're saying the perps are not punished in any way?
- smilekzs 6y ago
  Because right now, had the thieves been caught AND prosecuted, they would have to be put in jail, which is Known in the State of California to be Undesirable (/s, but not /s). This, plus the legislation that any theft < $950 is a misdemanor, means that the police never bother going after them. OTOH, if the alternative is instant corporal punishment (without clogging up the lines at the jail), then perhaps the laws can actually be enforced?

77777 6y ago

Didn't expect that last line ("BTW") but to be honest, I think something like that is the only solution. If you look at society 400-500 years ago, brutal punishment of this variety was the norm: theft in Restoration England was often enough met with hanging. Since then, the penalties for theft and other "petty" crimes have been reduced, to the point that now theft has been completely normalized. People complained, for example, when charges against Amy Cooper were dropped in New York, but the fact is that you can get arrested hundreds of times in New York, and your charges will always be dropped, for basically any charge, theft, assault, domestic violence, you name it, they drop it. There is a total unwillingness by people in power to inflict punishment on people who punish ordinary citizens by committing crimes against them, sending the signal committing crime is not at all, in fact, criminal, but normal, expected and acceptable behavior. Non-criminal people will flee such environments en masse or become criminals themselves. The result will be lawless cities that blowhards like Trump talk about but do nothing to fix, and only make worse. I am not saying we should go back to hanging people for theft. But we do need to figure out how to punish people without maintaining the Prison Industrial Complex. We need to figure out what is a crime (theft) and not a crime (drug use), we need to provide social services, food, shelter to poor people. We MUST provide education and opportunities to people. But if crime goes unpunished, perhaps in an asymmetric manner like caning, the lawlessness we're seeing today will grow much, much worse and make basic life unlivable in places that were once and still maybe are the pinnacles of civilization, like New York. It will destroy us.

capnrefsmmat 6y ago
It's hard to square this comment with the simple fact that property crime is, in the United States, currently much less common than it has been in decades. For example, household burglary dropped 56% from 1994 to 2011. https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4657 https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4657 Theft and motor vehicle theft have had similar major drops (figures 10 and 11): https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mpcncvs.pdf https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/mpcncvs.pdf This data is from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which directly asks respondents if they have been the victim of a crime, and is not based on police reports or prosecutions. The same decline has also been seen in violent crime, and is actually one of the major unanswered questions in modern criminology: why has crime declined by about half since 1990? There are many theories (you've probably seen the theories involving lead or pollution exposure) but no definitive answers. But whatever the explanation may be, it does not justify brutal punishment, since (a) crime is declining, not increasing, and (b) I'm not aware of any substantial evidence showing a major deterrent effect of severe prison sentences or even capital punishment.
- 77777 6y ago
  You may very well have statistics, but these statistics may very well be false, especially when it comes to including figures that represent quality of life (i.e. how anxious you are on a constant basis with respect to your property or being assaulted). Yes, home burglaries are usually reported and tracked in data. But, as it says in this very New York Times article, package theft goes completely unreported and is therefore not part of your statistics. Likewise, sexual assaults in subways are only very recently being tracked in New York. Why did you choose, by the way, to assume I was only talking about property crime? The types of crimes not tracked by NYPD is vast, and such crime I have seen escalating year over year. Stats are stats, but if you live in New York, you notice how 10 years ago people didn't rob Walgreens, and now they rob it all the time practically on an on-going basis. You just take what you need and walk past "security." See some boxes inside a vestibule? They're yours. But it's not just property crime, it's all crime.
  - capnrefsmmat 6y ago

monadic5 6y ago

My advice: lobby for stronger personal stimulus from congress. It's hardly a mystery why this is happening. Also if you think you're being preyed upon: you're hanging out on a forum with millionaires. This forum is far more predatory than porch theft ever could be. It's only a quirk of fate that our grift is legal and theirs is not.

filereaper 6y ago

Lived in Singapore, Caning is absolutely barbaric and an atrocious way of punishment. They have special people who are trained in caning and the culprit will get their 30 lashes or whatever regardless of whether they pass out at lash 19 say. They'll heal you up and back you go for the next 11 lashes. This is what they did in medieval times, not today. Singapore is barbaric in this aspect and this is enforced in middle schools as well. It turns kids into obedient robots. Whatever solution is proposed, caning is not one of them.

avs733 6y ago
the conversation on this thread is bizarre and concerning. It's stuff...it's literally stuff! The lead example is a blazer... That commenters are willing to permanently disfigure people because their blazer, or table leg is taken speaks to a lack of seeing others as human. I somehow think their would be an entirely different conversation about appropriate punishment if the article was about fraud or misconduct by the landlords, or centered the article on the landlords not providing reasonable service. my last apartment complex had universal package delivery lockers as a service. This is a totally solvable problem, the landlords are just cheap and as a result lets beat people. The other comment thread of 'you may well have your statistics but I have an opinion and anecdotes' is just exemplary of why this country has the justice system it does.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Apparently violence is the only language they have ever known. The commentators, that is.
- totalZero 6y ago
  Theft isn't a crime against stuff, it's a crime against the person whose stuff was taken. Stuff represents plans (supplies), freedom (means of transport), abilities (tools), and connections (devices). Your mentality legitimizes crime.
- smilekzs 6y ago
  Your quote is not literal. Here is the more relevant literal quotes: """ You may very well have statistics, but these statistics may very well be false, especially when it comes to including figures that represent quality of life (i.e. how anxious you are on a constant basis with respect to your property or being assaulted). ... But, as it says in this very New York Times article, package theft goes completely unreported and is therefore not part of your statistics. Likewise, sexual assaults in subways are only very recently being tracked in New York. """

barbacoa 6y ago

By contrast, in Texas the law allows you to use lethal force to protect your property. You can literally shoot someone in the back as they run away with your amazon package if you have no other reasonable way to prevent your property from theft. https://www.shouselaw.com/tx/crimes/defenses/self-defense/ https://www.shouselaw.com/tx/crimes/defenses/self-defense/

avs733 6y ago
well good, we wouldn't want you to be without your nice gray women's blazer...that thief's family be damned!
- barbacoa 6y ago
  There have been some pretty outlandish example of this law over the years. https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/jilted-john-acquitted-texas-prostitute-death-article-1.1365975 https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/jilted-john-acquitted... Crazy how big of a difference in laws there are across the states.
- 29083011397778 6y ago
  I'd assume your point would be dramatically more sympathetic if you used the term "Implied thief" - while theft is wrong, turning residents into judge, jury, and executioner sounds insane to me. I wouldn't even expect this to be limited to the truly insane citizens of Texas - simply an aggressive one that doesn't see their package and sees you leaving with what must (in their mind) be their property
BrandoElFollito 6y ago
It is not clear to me whether this includes the case of squatters. You comme back home after 2 weeks away and find your house occupied - can you use force to remove them from your property?

hshshs2 6y ago

why do you think petty theft warrants state administered violence?

estaseuropano 6y ago

I don't understand this kind of perspective. You ate completely olivipus to the root of the problem: why would mail carriers even leave parcels on the porch or similar? In most (all?) European countries the rule is that they ring the bell, if you don't answer they leave a note and either leave it with a neighbour, come back a day later, or you have to pick it up from the post office. In addition nowadays you can ask to get mail delivered to a specific kind of locker (operated by the mail service) where you can pick it up any time of day. Really, such a weird perspective to want to reintroduce capital punishment rather than force the companies to use one of the many available solutions. You have accepted that the legal burden is on you, rather than the carrier paid to get the package to you - which is just absurd.

steve_g 6y ago
In English, the term for caning would be "corporal" punishment. Capital punishment is the death penalty. Corporal means pertaining to the physical body.

himinlomax 6y ago

Why invoke caning when you're saying the perps are not punished in any way?

smilekzs 6y ago
Because right now, had the thieves been caught AND prosecuted, they would have to be put in jail, which is Known in the State of California to be Undesirable (/s, but not /s). This, plus the legislation that any theft < $950 is a misdemanor, means that the police never bother going after them. OTOH, if the alternative is instant corporal punishment (without clogging up the lines at the jail), then perhaps the laws can actually be enforced?