6 ms·

The issue is reporting. Where I live about 4 years ago they stopped prosecuting people who steal less than 500$. My friend who is a cop said they eventually st

The issue is reporting. Where I live about 4 years ago they stopped prosecuting people who steal less than 500$. My friend who is a cop said they eventually stopped arresting them because its unethical to arrest someone for a crime they won't be prosecuted for. Then stores stopped calling the cops. This resulted in more crime but less reported crime for burglary. The only statics you can really count on is Car thefts and murders. There was a surge in murders in starting in 2020 which has leveled off but it was still high. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/united-states/murder-homicide-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni... The same is true for car thefts https://www.statista.com/statistics/191216/reported-motor-vehicle-theft-rate-in-the-us-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191216/reported-motor-ve... I think it reliable to say the US experienced a large surge in crime starting in 2020.

nativeit 3y ago
The issue is the economic and societal problems that drive desperation and widening inequality. It is symptomatic of the short-term thinking and opportunistic nature of an economic model that inherently ignores the implications of its incentives and how their impacts will affect all stakeholders other than investors and their share prices. Let’s not pretend that more incarceration and law enforcement encounters will fix anything, they’re much more likely to further exacerbate the root problem.
- geraldwhen 3y ago
  I’d happily pay more in tax to jail every thief in the country.
  - DinoDad13 3y ago
    How much more would you pay?
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    Be careful that you yourself or some of your relatives don't end up in jail for white collar crime with that approach. You know less about others than you think.
    - dumbo-octopus 3y ago
      I think white collar crime should be prosecuted, even if it might æffect me or my relatives. Is that controversial now?
      - antisthenes 3y ago
        I was talking more about the misguided approach of "trying to get every last criminal" by being overzealous in policing. Par for the course for HN to misinterpret it, of course.
        dumbo-octopus 3y ago
        Certainly the courts should still exist under this hypothetical.
- api 3y ago
  It’s organized gangs that have found a loophole: commit “greasy crimes” at scale where the individual crimes are below a threshold. This is similar to the epidemic of small hit large scale online scams and mail fraud, but in person. It’s a new kind of organized crime enabled by digital technology.
- eej71 3y ago
  I'd make the case your viewpoint is symptomatic of the power of bad ideas. In this case, specifically accepting the idea that individuals do not have responsibility for their own actions or for how they relate to the people around them.
  - kspacewalk2 3y ago
    It also, in a weird way, infantilizes and removes agency from marginalized people. You can in fact be both marginalized and honest, and most marginalized people are.
    - kouru225 3y ago
      And the rich can, in fact, be rich and not steal. Maybe we should put our efforts towards stopping the infantilization of the rich thieves that are responsible for the vast majority of theft in this country? Or are we only gonna clutch our pearls at the petty crime?
      - kspacewalk2 3y ago
        We could also acknowledge two problems simultaneously, without downplaying or minimizing either. That way, neither you nor your imaginary rhetorical opponent is "clutching their pearls".
  - kouru225 3y ago
    Ridiculous of you to act like this denies their responsibility. When the rich steal millions from the poor daily we should absolutely expect an increase in crime. To blame this solely on the poor is a denial of the responsibility of the rich.
  - iron_ball 3y ago
    I mean, can't it be both? Individuals have personal agency and are responsible for their own actions. Individuals also respond to incentives which, in aggregate, alter the observed distribution of those individual decisions. The problem can be addressed at both levels.
- hallway_monitor 3y ago
  You're partly correct - people are getting more desparate and hopeless because their prospects are grim, and nihilistic because they feel their lives have no meaning. That's a problem and crime will continue to get worse as these feelings pervade American society. But also, we need to arrest and prosecute criminals, because not doing so encourages crime. It accelerates the downward spiral.
- YokoZar 3y ago
  Sure. On the other hand, arresting 11 specific people reduced bike theft by 90% in London: https://www.itv.com/news/2024-02-26/a-police-sting-uncovered-130000-worth-of-stolen-bikes-and-cut-thefts-by-90 https://www.itv.com/news/2024-02-26/a-police-sting-uncovered... When crime gets to the point where a police tactic as simple as "putting out a bait bicycle, waiting for it to get stolen, and then following it to a warehouse of stolen bicycles" results in a huge reduction of actual crime committed, then maybe the solution isn't purely about wealth inequality.
  - DinoDad13 3y ago
    Sure sure but when it turns out 90% of crime is from 11 people it stops making sense to pass laws punishing all people of a certain class and/or giving police incredible amounts of power with little or no oversight.
- lebean 3y ago
  Well a lot of the sub-$500 petty theft are done by junkies trying to get their fix for the day, and with opiate addiction getting worse, not better, in the US, there are many of these types and the day-by-day thefts add up over the years. Throwing a repeat offender in jail for a couple weeks is often the only time a junkie will kick, so it kind of does solves the root problem for these individuals. Even some hard-ass jurisdictions have half way houses. Source: me, an ex junkie, and had junkie friends. Go ahead and write this off as an anecdote, but it's an anecdote repeated thousands upon thousands of times.
- analyte123 3y ago
  Most people affected by economic and social problems do not resort to theft to solve their problems. In fact, they are probably far more likely to be a victim - either directly out of sheer proximity or indirectly as stores close and opportunities fade away due to all the theft being allowed in their community.
- sabarn01 3y ago
  We arrested more people for 30 years and crime went down. There is loads of data that more police in the right places deter crime. All my LEO friends know who that are arresting because they arrest the same people over and over. Crime is driven by a small number of bad actors.
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    I remember what ten years ago in San Francisco the cops found a guy shot to death in Bayview. Cops suspicion was he broke into the wrong car and a gang member shot him. Guy had been arrested over a hundred times for breaking into cars in the previous couple of years. So this guy was breaking into several cars a day every day for years and only stopped when someone shot him. I definitely feel that old school habitual criminal laws were over strict and subject to abuse. But not having them at all is also bad.
- robocat 3y ago
  Drugs drive theft, not inequality. Anecdotally most of theives I have known of here in New Zealand (Christchurch) are driven by wanting to buy hard drugs. In my experience poorer people here seem to have fairly strict morals against theft.
fakecontent000 3y ago
[dead]
geraldwhen 3y ago
Theft is defacto legal in America. It’s too dangerous to prosecute theft; if you do, you could be accused of racial policing, which would cause riots. Better to legalize theft. The police here won’t even respond to car theft other than to help file an insurance claim.
- timr 3y ago
  I don't have anything to contribute to the theory, but an anecdote: for a couple weeks last month in NYC, seemingly every street tout had sealed boxes of Apple AirPods sitting on their blankets, next to their fake bags, watches, etc. Other guys were specializing in the trade, standing on street corners holding 2-3 boxes of AirPods, but nothing else. These appeared to be legit products, but obviously stolen. Where did these come from? Why weren't the sellers arrested on sight? Is it that hard to know that Apple hasn't authorized the corner blanket guy as a reseller? Is possession of stolen goods no longer a crime? I was low-key hoping that the police had some kind of sting running to get the source of the theft, but...who knows? So many questions.
  - Kirby64 3y ago
    AirPods fakes are extremely, extremely convincing these days. I would be surprised if they were real stolen products from the Apple Store.
    - timr 3y ago
      If so, these were exceptional fakes, down to the quality of the packaging.
      - Kirby64 3y ago
        Yup, and you can even buy them for $10-20 off sites like Aliexpress or Temu. They even do the popup for pairing when you open them. The audio quality and ANC is not so great, as far as I know, though.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
DinoDad13 3y ago
These charts really show how overblown the murder/car theft issues are now. Higher than pre-pandemic yes, but still relatively low.
- leereeves 3y ago
  Relatively low...meaning slightly lower than 1994, when crime was so high that even black community leaders called for more police, and then Senator Joe Biden wrote "the largest crime bill in the history of the United States" that funded 100,000 more police officers and $10 billion for additional prisons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Crime_Control_and_Law_Enforcement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Crime_Control_and_Law_... But up 50% from the early 2010s.
  - DinoDad13 3y ago
    Yes so stop freaking out over relatively low crime. Remember the lessons from that time.
    - sabarn01 3y ago
      Lowering Crime was the lesson I took away from it.
      - DinoDad13 3y ago
        How do you lower crime?
        sabarn01 3y ago
        Reduction in the rate of murders seems like a good metric.
- sabarn01 3y ago
  a 50% rise in murder rate represent thousands of people I don't think we should discount it. I also think the rise in theft that people talk about anecdotally effects how people feel about living in cities. The us accepts a very large amount of disorder and that effects the overall trust in the society. Just an FYI. Crime is awful. If your poor and your stuff gets stolen that devastating having to pay more to secure you belongings is a real burden. Nothing makes an area poor like crime. The single most valuable things governments do is law and order the fact that we forgot that in 2020 should be distressing to everyone.
TMWNN 3y ago
>The issue is reporting. Where I live about 4 years ago they stopped prosecuting people who steal less than 500$. My friend who is a cop said they eventually stopped arresting them because its unethical to arrest someone for a crime they won't be prosecuted for. Then stores stopped calling the cops. This resulted in more crime but less reported crime for burglary. "The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it". —Jeff Bezos <https://sports.yahoo.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-explains-212315127.html https://sports.yahoo.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-explains-2123...>
- DinoDad13 3y ago
  What a convenient way to dismiss all data.

nativeit 3y ago

The issue is the economic and societal problems that drive desperation and widening inequality. It is symptomatic of the short-term thinking and opportunistic nature of an economic model that inherently ignores the implications of its incentives and how their impacts will affect all stakeholders other than investors and their share prices. Let’s not pretend that more incarceration and law enforcement encounters will fix anything, they’re much more likely to further exacerbate the root problem.

geraldwhen 3y ago
I’d happily pay more in tax to jail every thief in the country.
- DinoDad13 3y ago
  How much more would you pay?
- antisthenes 3y ago
  Be careful that you yourself or some of your relatives don't end up in jail for white collar crime with that approach. You know less about others than you think.
  - dumbo-octopus 3y ago
    I think white collar crime should be prosecuted, even if it might æffect me or my relatives. Is that controversial now?
    - antisthenes 3y ago
      I was talking more about the misguided approach of "trying to get every last criminal" by being overzealous in policing. Par for the course for HN to misinterpret it, of course.
      - dumbo-octopus 3y ago
        Certainly the courts should still exist under this hypothetical.
api 3y ago
It’s organized gangs that have found a loophole: commit “greasy crimes” at scale where the individual crimes are below a threshold. This is similar to the epidemic of small hit large scale online scams and mail fraud, but in person. It’s a new kind of organized crime enabled by digital technology.
eej71 3y ago
I'd make the case your viewpoint is symptomatic of the power of bad ideas. In this case, specifically accepting the idea that individuals do not have responsibility for their own actions or for how they relate to the people around them.
- kspacewalk2 3y ago
  It also, in a weird way, infantilizes and removes agency from marginalized people. You can in fact be both marginalized and honest, and most marginalized people are.
  - kouru225 3y ago
    And the rich can, in fact, be rich and not steal. Maybe we should put our efforts towards stopping the infantilization of the rich thieves that are responsible for the vast majority of theft in this country? Or are we only gonna clutch our pearls at the petty crime?
    - kspacewalk2 3y ago
      We could also acknowledge two problems simultaneously, without downplaying or minimizing either. That way, neither you nor your imaginary rhetorical opponent is "clutching their pearls".
- kouru225 3y ago
  Ridiculous of you to act like this denies their responsibility. When the rich steal millions from the poor daily we should absolutely expect an increase in crime. To blame this solely on the poor is a denial of the responsibility of the rich.
- iron_ball 3y ago
  I mean, can't it be both? Individuals have personal agency and are responsible for their own actions. Individuals also respond to incentives which, in aggregate, alter the observed distribution of those individual decisions. The problem can be addressed at both levels.
hallway_monitor 3y ago
You're partly correct - people are getting more desparate and hopeless because their prospects are grim, and nihilistic because they feel their lives have no meaning. That's a problem and crime will continue to get worse as these feelings pervade American society. But also, we need to arrest and prosecute criminals, because not doing so encourages crime. It accelerates the downward spiral.
YokoZar 3y ago
Sure. On the other hand, arresting 11 specific people reduced bike theft by 90% in London: https://www.itv.com/news/2024-02-26/a-police-sting-uncovered-130000-worth-of-stolen-bikes-and-cut-thefts-by-90 https://www.itv.com/news/2024-02-26/a-police-sting-uncovered... When crime gets to the point where a police tactic as simple as "putting out a bait bicycle, waiting for it to get stolen, and then following it to a warehouse of stolen bicycles" results in a huge reduction of actual crime committed, then maybe the solution isn't purely about wealth inequality.
- DinoDad13 3y ago
  Sure sure but when it turns out 90% of crime is from 11 people it stops making sense to pass laws punishing all people of a certain class and/or giving police incredible amounts of power with little or no oversight.
lebean 3y ago
Well a lot of the sub-$500 petty theft are done by junkies trying to get their fix for the day, and with opiate addiction getting worse, not better, in the US, there are many of these types and the day-by-day thefts add up over the years. Throwing a repeat offender in jail for a couple weeks is often the only time a junkie will kick, so it kind of does solves the root problem for these individuals. Even some hard-ass jurisdictions have half way houses. Source: me, an ex junkie, and had junkie friends. Go ahead and write this off as an anecdote, but it's an anecdote repeated thousands upon thousands of times.
analyte123 3y ago
Most people affected by economic and social problems do not resort to theft to solve their problems. In fact, they are probably far more likely to be a victim - either directly out of sheer proximity or indirectly as stores close and opportunities fade away due to all the theft being allowed in their community.
sabarn01 3y ago
We arrested more people for 30 years and crime went down. There is loads of data that more police in the right places deter crime. All my LEO friends know who that are arresting because they arrest the same people over and over. Crime is driven by a small number of bad actors.
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  I remember what ten years ago in San Francisco the cops found a guy shot to death in Bayview. Cops suspicion was he broke into the wrong car and a gang member shot him. Guy had been arrested over a hundred times for breaking into cars in the previous couple of years. So this guy was breaking into several cars a day every day for years and only stopped when someone shot him. I definitely feel that old school habitual criminal laws were over strict and subject to abuse. But not having them at all is also bad.
robocat 3y ago
Drugs drive theft, not inequality. Anecdotally most of theives I have known of here in New Zealand (Christchurch) are driven by wanting to buy hard drugs. In my experience poorer people here seem to have fairly strict morals against theft.

fakecontent000 3y ago

[dead]

geraldwhen 3y ago

Theft is defacto legal in America. It’s too dangerous to prosecute theft; if you do, you could be accused of racial policing, which would cause riots. Better to legalize theft. The police here won’t even respond to car theft other than to help file an insurance claim.

timr 3y ago
I don't have anything to contribute to the theory, but an anecdote: for a couple weeks last month in NYC, seemingly every street tout had sealed boxes of Apple AirPods sitting on their blankets, next to their fake bags, watches, etc. Other guys were specializing in the trade, standing on street corners holding 2-3 boxes of AirPods, but nothing else. These appeared to be legit products, but obviously stolen. Where did these come from? Why weren't the sellers arrested on sight? Is it that hard to know that Apple hasn't authorized the corner blanket guy as a reseller? Is possession of stolen goods no longer a crime? I was low-key hoping that the police had some kind of sting running to get the source of the theft, but...who knows? So many questions.
- Kirby64 3y ago
  AirPods fakes are extremely, extremely convincing these days. I would be surprised if they were real stolen products from the Apple Store.
  - timr 3y ago
    If so, these were exceptional fakes, down to the quality of the packaging.
    - Kirby64 3y ago
      Yup, and you can even buy them for $10-20 off sites like Aliexpress or Temu. They even do the popup for pairing when you open them. The audio quality and ANC is not so great, as far as I know, though.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

DinoDad13 3y ago

These charts really show how overblown the murder/car theft issues are now. Higher than pre-pandemic yes, but still relatively low.

leereeves 3y ago
Relatively low...meaning slightly lower than 1994, when crime was so high that even black community leaders called for more police, and then Senator Joe Biden wrote "the largest crime bill in the history of the United States" that funded 100,000 more police officers and $10 billion for additional prisons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Crime_Control_and_Law_Enforcement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Crime_Control_and_Law_... But up 50% from the early 2010s.
- DinoDad13 3y ago
  Yes so stop freaking out over relatively low crime. Remember the lessons from that time.
  - sabarn01 3y ago
    Lowering Crime was the lesson I took away from it.
    - DinoDad13 3y ago
      How do you lower crime?
      - sabarn01 3y ago
        Reduction in the rate of murders seems like a good metric.
sabarn01 3y ago
a 50% rise in murder rate represent thousands of people I don't think we should discount it. I also think the rise in theft that people talk about anecdotally effects how people feel about living in cities. The us accepts a very large amount of disorder and that effects the overall trust in the society. Just an FYI. Crime is awful. If your poor and your stuff gets stolen that devastating having to pay more to secure you belongings is a real burden. Nothing makes an area poor like crime. The single most valuable things governments do is law and order the fact that we forgot that in 2020 should be distressing to everyone.

TMWNN 3y ago

>The issue is reporting. Where I live about 4 years ago they stopped prosecuting people who steal less than 500$. My friend who is a cop said they eventually stopped arresting them because its unethical to arrest someone for a crime they won't be prosecuted for. Then stores stopped calling the cops. This resulted in more crime but less reported crime for burglary. "The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it". —Jeff Bezos <https://sports.yahoo.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-explains-212315127.html https://sports.yahoo.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-explains-2123...>

DinoDad13 3y ago
What a convenient way to dismiss all data.