9 ms·

One thing I really don’t understand: why isn’t this trivially solvable with policing? Just make car theft / break-ins a bad play game-theory wise: a few cars o

One thing I really don’t understand: why isn’t this trivially solvable with policing? Just make car theft / break-ins a bad play game-theory wise: a few cars on the street are left with the police ready to pounce. You break in to a bait car, you get 2 years in jail. Would take not that many resources, for not that long. Word would spread fast that breaking into cars is not “free” anymore. Seems like this is what we do with every other crime: you don’t avoid speeding because you _know_ you’ll get caught, you avoid speeding because there’s a 1% chance of getting caught and being fined 1000x the benefit you derived from it.

hcarvalhoalves 2y ago
In many jurisdictions it’s illegal for the state to setup a “trap” to imprison people, like a decoy car to be stolen. This voids the validity of the proof in trial. Isn’t that the case in Canada?
- p51-remorse 2y ago
  I thought entrapment had an element of the state convincing you to commit a crime. My understanding is if the state just leaves an Acura somewhere, and you break into it, it’s fair game.
  - papercrane 2y ago
    Entrapment is when the state induces someone to commit a crime they would not have otherwise committed. For something to be entrapment, the state must overcome some level of resistance, not just provide an opportunity for a crime. For example, leaving a car out and watching it get stolen is not entrapment. Buying drugs and then arresting the seller is not entrapment. The police in Canada have a tactic, called "Mr. Big", where they introduce a suspect to an undercover agent posing as a criminal, usually posing as a high-level organized crime member, and then getting the trust of the suspect. This has resulted in entrapment. For example, in R. v. Mack, a police used a "Mr. Big" style system to try and get Mack to sell drugs. It wasn't until the police threatened him that he agreed, after which they arrested him. His conviction was later thrown out because it was ruled this was entrapment.
- goda90 2y ago
  I don't think bait cars would constitute entrapment unless the police were directly telling the thief to go steal a car.
- dinkumthinkum 2y ago
  Bait cars are not entrapment. In many jurisdictions in the west there is a sentiment against prosecuting criminals or even preventing crime, that’s the real issue.
goda90 2y ago
Police use bait cars in several jurisdictions already. It seems to reduce theft but not eliminate it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_car
neom 2y ago
Straight up, I'm not at all being cute, I moved to Toronto in December and so far the only cops I've ever seen are the cops that are protecting construction sites. Really. And people told me oh it's just winter we have beat cops in the summer... uhm, it's the summer now and I still don't see any beat cops. No clue what is going on here but it's extremely weird.
- 486sx33 2y ago
  Torontos police budget is over 1 Billion :) look what you get for that money? They bought a couple more helicopters though!
  - neom 2y ago
    This city is totally out of control and needs a lot of help. I don't know how it got so out of control, but nobody seems to be in control of setting a tone and tenor here. I've had worse things happen to me and seen worse things happening on the street than I ever, ever saw in SF, and that's saying something.
    - pixxel 2y ago
      > I don't know how it got so out of control Because you won’t say the reason.
    - AlexandrB 2y ago
      Don't worry, City Hall is hard at work solving the important problems: https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/get-involved/community/recognition-review/renaming-dundas-street/ https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/get-involved/communi...
  - throw0101d 2y ago
    > They bought a couple more helicopters though! It was the province (OPP) that bought (will buy) the helicopters, and they will be accessible for use by all the agencies in the GTA: * https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-police-helicopters-1.7161232 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-police-helico... TPS has never owned their owned helicopters, but have used York Region's.
dinkumthinkum 2y ago
You are right about it being trivial to solve but what you may be unaware of is solving this problem is exactly not what Canada, California, Maryland, etc states want to solve. Arrests would imply oppression. The idea is the only reason people are stealing cars is because the price of new cars of gone up and all car thieves are just Aladdin trying to feed their families. Even the notion of ownership is questioned in these municipalities. Also, the proponents of these positions will disagree, incorrectly, with you that threat of punishment has any effect on crime. Even the so-called prosecutors seek to not prosecute criminals or even seek “non-carceral forms of punishment” even for crimes like murder.
ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
>why isn’t this trivially solvable with policing? That would require the cops to actually care about catching criminals.
- xienze 2y ago
  I think you're ignoring several realities: First, cops can't be everywhere at all times. Cars are going to be stolen wherever the cops currently aren't. Second, cops can't possibly follow up on every single car theft. When there's more unsolved crimes than officers to investigate, things have to be prioritized. When there's a LOT of car theft, the case of YOUR car being stolen is going to fall way down the list of things to follow up on. That doesn't mean they don't care, but that you're one of many victims being handled by an overwhelmed system. Finally, if cops launch a massive crackdown on car theft and it just so happens that the majority of criminals are minorities, will activist DAs, the media, and the public accept that or launch into tirades about how police are racist?
  - ams92 2y ago
    This is nearly identical to the massive issues with retail and car theft that we have in San Francisco. The uber liberals will say “oh they’re just trying to feed their families” while there are endless low skilled jobs (since the pandemic) available that pay $20+ an hour. The reality is that current policing and prosecution rules/prosecution practices make being a retail thief more convenient than getting a job. Nothing is going to change until the punishment becomes a deterrent again.
  - ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
    The cars are being exported on ships. Monitor the docks. But they won't, because that's hard and someone's getting a bribe.
immibis 2y ago
I'll get banned for saying it, but it really seems like police (everywhere) don't really care about solving everyday crimes. They would rather use their powers in politically motivated activities, like stopping protests.
- wickedsight 2y ago
  As someone who worked in LE, it couldn't be further from the truth... At least where I'm from. People still think this way over here though. It's really impossible to do well for the majority of people.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Your view on this is influenced by which bubble you operate in. Horrible police interactions happen at the frequency approximating plane crashes, but social media has influenced people’s Bayesian priors off from reality by about 4 orders of magnitude, including in the minds of police who are now weighing risk/reward in a way that puts more of the risk on to society.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- 1over137 2y ago
  Not sure about that. In Montreal, they refuse to remove the McGill encampment for example.
  - immibis 2y ago
    So an encampment at a university, a place traditionally fully of protestors, was left open. Meanwhile, an encampment in a public space was quickly shut down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v45W-KKo3tg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v45W-KKo3tg . The purpose of a system is what it does, and this clearly shows that university students are only allowed to inconvenience their universities (who have the power to expel them) but nobody else.
  - 2y ago
walls 2y ago
Police have worked themselves into a position where they have all the authority, and no accountability. There is no upside for them to doing their jobs, and half the population will wear police-themed flags supporting their right to act this way.
georgeplusplus 2y ago
First off your idea is entrapment and generally not tolerated in a free society. Secondly your idea would make sense if you were trying to actually catch criminals. like many other large western cities, policing has become a political issue and are no longer allowed to police. They catch criminals and then release them to the streets hours later without charge. Policing has become political in Left leaning cities.
- p51-remorse 2y ago
  Re entrapment, see discussion on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40916066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40916066 - I’m reasonably sure this can be done in a way that isn’t entrapment. (Though whether the 9th circuit redefines it would be a different question)
  - dghlsakjg 2y ago
    This is Canada. The 9th circuit is irrelevant up here
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  That isn’t entrapment. Entrapment has to include an element of coercion to commit a crime that otherwise would not have been committed. Stealing a car that happens to belong to, and is monitored by the police is no one’s idea of entrapment. Bait stings are pretty well tolerated in modern society, since you have to steal a car to be stung.
newzisforsukas 2y ago
What are you going to do, buy 1000 high value bait cars to evenly distribute over probable target areas and hope they get broken into so you can catch people? That doesn't sound trivial to me or assuredly useful. It is also a decent investment for a city, with high depreciation and no guaranteed return. This also has obvious workarounds, like targeting residential neighborhoods with cars in driveways instead of cars on the street.
- p51-remorse 2y ago
  1000 cars could probably be had, new, for $30M. Not much for a large city or state. San Francisco’s city budget is in excess of 14B this year: https://www.kqed.org/news/11957640/budget-deep-dive-san-francisco https://www.kqed.org/news/11957640/budget-deep-dive-san-fran.... Seems like a trivial investment to reduce the #1 crime people have come to associate with your city. The guaranteed return is citizens not having their cars broken into. Better tourism, better economic opportunities (you can do a lot more business when you’re not worried about a degenerate breaking your windows). And anyway, you probably need closer to 10 cars. You don’t need very many high profile prosecutions before the average person gets the message.
  - newzisforsukas 2y ago
    > 1000 cars could probably be had, new, for $30M. I'd assume no one is risking stealing $30,000 cars to sell internationally. > The guaranteed return is citizens not having their cars broken into. Better tourism, better economic opportunities (you can do a lot more business when you’re not worried about a degenerate breaking your windows). TFA is about stealing cars, not smash and grabs. > The guaranteed return is citizens not having their cars broken into. How? Stealing a car is already a high risk crime. If there is a less than .1% chance of encountering a bait car, and you are a desperate person, you probably aren't going to care much about the risk. > high profile prosecution If we were talking smash and grabs, there isn't going to be high profile prosecutions, and it doesn't seem like this is true [1]. [1] https://popcenter.asu.edu/content/sting-operations-page-5#:~:text=They%20Do%20Not%20Reduce%20or,crimes%20were%20prevented%20long%20term https://popcenter.asu.edu/content/sting-operations-page-5#:~....
nwmcsween 2y ago
Canada has very lax crime punishment, which is sad for the victims. There's been cases where people have killed others after 3-x crimes and released with future court dates.
VancouverMan 2y ago
It probably should be that simple. Unfortunately, Canada is a surprisingly broken place in many ways. We have to remember that policing in Canada is heavily unionized, on top of being taxpayer-funded. That means quality of service is just not a concern at all most of the time. There are no repercussions for the police doing a bad job. There is perhaps even some incentive to let there be some crime: this lets the police call for an even bigger budget the next year. In general, less-serious crimes are basically ignored in many cases, and even serious crimes don't get much attention. The situation is complicated by the fact that many involved with auto thefts, especially in and around Toronto and other major cities, are foreigners/immigrants/"minorities". There's a tendency for activists and the media to cry "racism" or "police brutality" whenever such people are subjected to any sort of policing, no matter how reasonable and necessary this may be, and no matter how irrelevant race is to the situation. Politicians and the police end up backing off, presumably because they don't want to deal with the faux outrage that might arise if they actually did go after such criminals in any meaningful way. Criminals with foreign citizenship also often have the ability to flee Canada, which can make arrests very difficult, if not impossible. It can vary by region, but the criminal courts are often backlogged, too. Even if an arrest is made, and an investigation is performed, and prosecution is deemed feasible, it's not that unusual for cases involving serious crimes to be thrown out due to it simply taking too long to process them. In the relatively rare situation where a case is actually heard and a conviction is obtained, it isn't uncommon for judges to be extraordinarily lenient when sentencing. This is especially true if so-called "indigenous" or "minorities" are involved. On top of all of that, it doesn't help that self-defense is perhaps one of the most criminalized activities in Canada. Canadians aren't permitted to arm themselves in any meaningful way, and we aren't permitted to defend ourselves against criminals except under very limited circumstances. If you happen to see your property being damaged or stolen, for example, the only practical option is to sit back and watch the crime happen. Any sort of direct intervention, no matter how reasonable, will likely be worse for you than for the criminal(s). There are probably other factors that I missed. Something that should be quite simple ends up being tremendously complicated.
- tharmas 2y ago
  Thanks for having the courage to mention the unmentionable. Its staggering the pace of Canada's enshitification since COVID.
anotherhue 2y ago
The cost of incarcerating someone for a year is about 5x the value of the car. Bring back banishment.
- ImJamal 2y ago
  Are there any examples of banishment working with so many people? In the past when you lived in a village where everybody knows everybody else it seems like it could work. With modern large cities you could just move to another part of the same city and never see the same people again.
smnrchrds 2y ago
> Just make car theft / break-ins a bad play game-theory wise: a few cars on the street are left with the police ready to pounce. You break in to a bait car, you get 2 years in jail. I think car theft situation is not bad enough for this to work. There are ~9 million registered cars in Ontario [0]. Population of Toronto is about 20% of the population of Ontario [1][2], so we should expect there to be about 1.8 million cars in Toronto. Last year, there were 12,000 car thefts in Toronto [3], which is way worse than the national average. It doesn't make sense for the police to use bait cars, because given the above statistics, they can expect to catch 6 or 7 people per year if they deploy 1000 bait cars and have officers around each one year-round ready to pounce. That would be a very expensive way to catch only 6 criminals. The cost per conviction would be astronomical. It wouldn't change the criminals' behaviour either because if the police deploy 1000 bait vehicles in a city with 1.8 million vehicles, the chances of the one car the criminal is stealing being a bait would be just 0.05%. The chances of getting caught for other reasons would sure overshadow this slight increase, so I don't expect it to have much effect on overall risk and thus behaviour. There are some simplifying assumptions I made to do the above calculations, for example that the odds of theft are the same across neighbourhoods and parking situations. That means the results are not very accurate. However, they should be within an order of magnitude. We cannot expect to change the theft situation with a small number of cars and a reasonable budget. Now, if we could deploy 100,000 bait vehicles in Toronto alone, that would be a different story. But at that point, we would be way past the point where this could be called a trivial solution. [0] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2022023-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2022023... [1] https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/data-research-maps/toronto-at-a-glance/ https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/data-research-maps/to... [2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1710000901 https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=171000... [3] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/car-thefts-2023-toronto-figures-1.7147387 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/car-thefts-2023-toron... Please let me know if I made a mistake in the math.
throw0101d 2y ago
> Just make car theft / break-ins a bad play game-theory wise: a few cars on the street are left with the police ready to pounce. You break in to a bait car, you get 2 years in jail. Or they can just follow the cars that are stolen 'normally' and arrest those people: * https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tps-project-poacher-1.7242403 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tps-project-poacher-1... * https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/arrests-made-in-highly-orchestrated-gta-auto-theft-operation-police-1.6901947 https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/arrests-made-in-highly-orchestrat... * https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-project-volcano-arrest-1.7152299 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-project-volca... And why don't the US or UK do what you suggest, given they similar/worse numbers per the linked article: > While the US, Canada and the UK have all experienced a spike in car thefts since the Covid-19 pandemic, Canada’s rate of thefts (262.5 per 100,000 people) is higher than that of England and Wales (220 per 100,000 people), according to the latest available data from each country. > It is also fairly close to that of the US, which sits at around 300 vehicle thefts per 100,000 people, based on 2022 data.
Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
The cynical explanation here is that the cops are in on it as are railway and dock employees (not all but enough). There is just no way this could happen at the scale its happening without some inside help.

hcarvalhoalves 2y ago

In many jurisdictions it’s illegal for the state to setup a “trap” to imprison people, like a decoy car to be stolen. This voids the validity of the proof in trial. Isn’t that the case in Canada?

p51-remorse 2y ago
I thought entrapment had an element of the state convincing you to commit a crime. My understanding is if the state just leaves an Acura somewhere, and you break into it, it’s fair game.
- papercrane 2y ago
  Entrapment is when the state induces someone to commit a crime they would not have otherwise committed. For something to be entrapment, the state must overcome some level of resistance, not just provide an opportunity for a crime. For example, leaving a car out and watching it get stolen is not entrapment. Buying drugs and then arresting the seller is not entrapment. The police in Canada have a tactic, called "Mr. Big", where they introduce a suspect to an undercover agent posing as a criminal, usually posing as a high-level organized crime member, and then getting the trust of the suspect. This has resulted in entrapment. For example, in R. v. Mack, a police used a "Mr. Big" style system to try and get Mack to sell drugs. It wasn't until the police threatened him that he agreed, after which they arrested him. His conviction was later thrown out because it was ruled this was entrapment.
goda90 2y ago
I don't think bait cars would constitute entrapment unless the police were directly telling the thief to go steal a car.
dinkumthinkum 2y ago
Bait cars are not entrapment. In many jurisdictions in the west there is a sentiment against prosecuting criminals or even preventing crime, that’s the real issue.

goda90 2y ago

Police use bait cars in several jurisdictions already. It seems to reduce theft but not eliminate it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_car

neom 2y ago

Straight up, I'm not at all being cute, I moved to Toronto in December and so far the only cops I've ever seen are the cops that are protecting construction sites. Really. And people told me oh it's just winter we have beat cops in the summer... uhm, it's the summer now and I still don't see any beat cops. No clue what is going on here but it's extremely weird.

486sx33 2y ago
Torontos police budget is over 1 Billion :) look what you get for that money? They bought a couple more helicopters though!
- neom 2y ago
  This city is totally out of control and needs a lot of help. I don't know how it got so out of control, but nobody seems to be in control of setting a tone and tenor here. I've had worse things happen to me and seen worse things happening on the street than I ever, ever saw in SF, and that's saying something.
  - pixxel 2y ago
    > I don't know how it got so out of control Because you won’t say the reason.
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    Don't worry, City Hall is hard at work solving the important problems: https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/get-involved/community/recognition-review/renaming-dundas-street/ https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/get-involved/communi...
- throw0101d 2y ago
  > They bought a couple more helicopters though! It was the province (OPP) that bought (will buy) the helicopters, and they will be accessible for use by all the agencies in the GTA: * https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-police-helicopters-1.7161232 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-police-helico... TPS has never owned their owned helicopters, but have used York Region's.

dinkumthinkum 2y ago

You are right about it being trivial to solve but what you may be unaware of is solving this problem is exactly not what Canada, California, Maryland, etc states want to solve. Arrests would imply oppression. The idea is the only reason people are stealing cars is because the price of new cars of gone up and all car thieves are just Aladdin trying to feed their families. Even the notion of ownership is questioned in these municipalities. Also, the proponents of these positions will disagree, incorrectly, with you that threat of punishment has any effect on crime. Even the so-called prosecutors seek to not prosecute criminals or even seek “non-carceral forms of punishment” even for crimes like murder.

ThrowawayTestr 2y ago

>why isn’t this trivially solvable with policing? That would require the cops to actually care about catching criminals.

xienze 2y ago
I think you're ignoring several realities: First, cops can't be everywhere at all times. Cars are going to be stolen wherever the cops currently aren't. Second, cops can't possibly follow up on every single car theft. When there's more unsolved crimes than officers to investigate, things have to be prioritized. When there's a LOT of car theft, the case of YOUR car being stolen is going to fall way down the list of things to follow up on. That doesn't mean they don't care, but that you're one of many victims being handled by an overwhelmed system. Finally, if cops launch a massive crackdown on car theft and it just so happens that the majority of criminals are minorities, will activist DAs, the media, and the public accept that or launch into tirades about how police are racist?
- ams92 2y ago
  This is nearly identical to the massive issues with retail and car theft that we have in San Francisco. The uber liberals will say “oh they’re just trying to feed their families” while there are endless low skilled jobs (since the pandemic) available that pay $20+ an hour. The reality is that current policing and prosecution rules/prosecution practices make being a retail thief more convenient than getting a job. Nothing is going to change until the punishment becomes a deterrent again.
- ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
  The cars are being exported on ships. Monitor the docks. But they won't, because that's hard and someone's getting a bribe.

immibis 2y ago

I'll get banned for saying it, but it really seems like police (everywhere) don't really care about solving everyday crimes. They would rather use their powers in politically motivated activities, like stopping protests.

wickedsight 2y ago
As someone who worked in LE, it couldn't be further from the truth... At least where I'm from. People still think this way over here though. It's really impossible to do well for the majority of people.
mensetmanusman 2y ago
Your view on this is influenced by which bubble you operate in. Horrible police interactions happen at the frequency approximating plane crashes, but social media has influenced people’s Bayesian priors off from reality by about 4 orders of magnitude, including in the minds of police who are now weighing risk/reward in a way that puts more of the risk on to society.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
1over137 2y ago
Not sure about that. In Montreal, they refuse to remove the McGill encampment for example.
- immibis 2y ago
  So an encampment at a university, a place traditionally fully of protestors, was left open. Meanwhile, an encampment in a public space was quickly shut down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v45W-KKo3tg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v45W-KKo3tg . The purpose of a system is what it does, and this clearly shows that university students are only allowed to inconvenience their universities (who have the power to expel them) but nobody else.
- 2y ago

walls 2y ago

Police have worked themselves into a position where they have all the authority, and no accountability. There is no upside for them to doing their jobs, and half the population will wear police-themed flags supporting their right to act this way.

georgeplusplus 2y ago

First off your idea is entrapment and generally not tolerated in a free society. Secondly your idea would make sense if you were trying to actually catch criminals. like many other large western cities, policing has become a political issue and are no longer allowed to police. They catch criminals and then release them to the streets hours later without charge. Policing has become political in Left leaning cities.

p51-remorse 2y ago
Re entrapment, see discussion on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40916066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40916066 - I’m reasonably sure this can be done in a way that isn’t entrapment. (Though whether the 9th circuit redefines it would be a different question)
- dghlsakjg 2y ago
  This is Canada. The 9th circuit is irrelevant up here
dghlsakjg 2y ago
That isn’t entrapment. Entrapment has to include an element of coercion to commit a crime that otherwise would not have been committed. Stealing a car that happens to belong to, and is monitored by the police is no one’s idea of entrapment. Bait stings are pretty well tolerated in modern society, since you have to steal a car to be stung.

newzisforsukas 2y ago

What are you going to do, buy 1000 high value bait cars to evenly distribute over probable target areas and hope they get broken into so you can catch people? That doesn't sound trivial to me or assuredly useful. It is also a decent investment for a city, with high depreciation and no guaranteed return. This also has obvious workarounds, like targeting residential neighborhoods with cars in driveways instead of cars on the street.

p51-remorse 2y ago
1000 cars could probably be had, new, for $30M. Not much for a large city or state. San Francisco’s city budget is in excess of 14B this year: https://www.kqed.org/news/11957640/budget-deep-dive-san-francisco https://www.kqed.org/news/11957640/budget-deep-dive-san-fran.... Seems like a trivial investment to reduce the #1 crime people have come to associate with your city. The guaranteed return is citizens not having their cars broken into. Better tourism, better economic opportunities (you can do a lot more business when you’re not worried about a degenerate breaking your windows). And anyway, you probably need closer to 10 cars. You don’t need very many high profile prosecutions before the average person gets the message.
- newzisforsukas 2y ago
  > 1000 cars could probably be had, new, for $30M. I'd assume no one is risking stealing $30,000 cars to sell internationally. > The guaranteed return is citizens not having their cars broken into. Better tourism, better economic opportunities (you can do a lot more business when you’re not worried about a degenerate breaking your windows). TFA is about stealing cars, not smash and grabs. > The guaranteed return is citizens not having their cars broken into. How? Stealing a car is already a high risk crime. If there is a less than .1% chance of encountering a bait car, and you are a desperate person, you probably aren't going to care much about the risk. > high profile prosecution If we were talking smash and grabs, there isn't going to be high profile prosecutions, and it doesn't seem like this is true [1]. [1] https://popcenter.asu.edu/content/sting-operations-page-5#:~:text=They%20Do%20Not%20Reduce%20or,crimes%20were%20prevented%20long%20term https://popcenter.asu.edu/content/sting-operations-page-5#:~....

nwmcsween 2y ago

Canada has very lax crime punishment, which is sad for the victims. There's been cases where people have killed others after 3-x crimes and released with future court dates.

VancouverMan 2y ago

It probably should be that simple. Unfortunately, Canada is a surprisingly broken place in many ways. We have to remember that policing in Canada is heavily unionized, on top of being taxpayer-funded. That means quality of service is just not a concern at all most of the time. There are no repercussions for the police doing a bad job. There is perhaps even some incentive to let there be some crime: this lets the police call for an even bigger budget the next year. In general, less-serious crimes are basically ignored in many cases, and even serious crimes don't get much attention. The situation is complicated by the fact that many involved with auto thefts, especially in and around Toronto and other major cities, are foreigners/immigrants/"minorities". There's a tendency for activists and the media to cry "racism" or "police brutality" whenever such people are subjected to any sort of policing, no matter how reasonable and necessary this may be, and no matter how irrelevant race is to the situation. Politicians and the police end up backing off, presumably because they don't want to deal with the faux outrage that might arise if they actually did go after such criminals in any meaningful way. Criminals with foreign citizenship also often have the ability to flee Canada, which can make arrests very difficult, if not impossible. It can vary by region, but the criminal courts are often backlogged, too. Even if an arrest is made, and an investigation is performed, and prosecution is deemed feasible, it's not that unusual for cases involving serious crimes to be thrown out due to it simply taking too long to process them. In the relatively rare situation where a case is actually heard and a conviction is obtained, it isn't uncommon for judges to be extraordinarily lenient when sentencing. This is especially true if so-called "indigenous" or "minorities" are involved. On top of all of that, it doesn't help that self-defense is perhaps one of the most criminalized activities in Canada. Canadians aren't permitted to arm themselves in any meaningful way, and we aren't permitted to defend ourselves against criminals except under very limited circumstances. If you happen to see your property being damaged or stolen, for example, the only practical option is to sit back and watch the crime happen. Any sort of direct intervention, no matter how reasonable, will likely be worse for you than for the criminal(s). There are probably other factors that I missed. Something that should be quite simple ends up being tremendously complicated.

tharmas 2y ago
Thanks for having the courage to mention the unmentionable. Its staggering the pace of Canada's enshitification since COVID.

anotherhue 2y ago

The cost of incarcerating someone for a year is about 5x the value of the car. Bring back banishment.

ImJamal 2y ago
Are there any examples of banishment working with so many people? In the past when you lived in a village where everybody knows everybody else it seems like it could work. With modern large cities you could just move to another part of the same city and never see the same people again.

smnrchrds 2y ago

> Just make car theft / break-ins a bad play game-theory wise: a few cars on the street are left with the police ready to pounce. You break in to a bait car, you get 2 years in jail. I think car theft situation is not bad enough for this to work. There are ~9 million registered cars in Ontario [0]. Population of Toronto is about 20% of the population of Ontario [1][2], so we should expect there to be about 1.8 million cars in Toronto. Last year, there were 12,000 car thefts in Toronto [3], which is way worse than the national average. It doesn't make sense for the police to use bait cars, because given the above statistics, they can expect to catch 6 or 7 people per year if they deploy 1000 bait cars and have officers around each one year-round ready to pounce. That would be a very expensive way to catch only 6 criminals. The cost per conviction would be astronomical. It wouldn't change the criminals' behaviour either because if the police deploy 1000 bait vehicles in a city with 1.8 million vehicles, the chances of the one car the criminal is stealing being a bait would be just 0.05%. The chances of getting caught for other reasons would sure overshadow this slight increase, so I don't expect it to have much effect on overall risk and thus behaviour. There are some simplifying assumptions I made to do the above calculations, for example that the odds of theft are the same across neighbourhoods and parking situations. That means the results are not very accurate. However, they should be within an order of magnitude. We cannot expect to change the theft situation with a small number of cars and a reasonable budget. Now, if we could deploy 100,000 bait vehicles in Toronto alone, that would be a different story. But at that point, we would be way past the point where this could be called a trivial solution. [0] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2022023-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2022023... [1] https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/data-research-maps/toronto-at-a-glance/ https://www.toronto.ca/city-government/data-research-maps/to... [2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1710000901 https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=171000... [3] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/car-thefts-2023-toronto-figures-1.7147387 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/car-thefts-2023-toron... Please let me know if I made a mistake in the math.

throw0101d 2y ago

> Just make car theft / break-ins a bad play game-theory wise: a few cars on the street are left with the police ready to pounce. You break in to a bait car, you get 2 years in jail. Or they can just follow the cars that are stolen 'normally' and arrest those people: * https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tps-project-poacher-1.7242403 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tps-project-poacher-1... * https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/arrests-made-in-highly-orchestrated-gta-auto-theft-operation-police-1.6901947 https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/arrests-made-in-highly-orchestrat... * https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-project-volcano-arrest-1.7152299 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-project-volca... And why don't the US or UK do what you suggest, given they similar/worse numbers per the linked article: > While the US, Canada and the UK have all experienced a spike in car thefts since the Covid-19 pandemic, Canada’s rate of thefts (262.5 per 100,000 people) is higher than that of England and Wales (220 per 100,000 people), according to the latest available data from each country. > It is also fairly close to that of the US, which sits at around 300 vehicle thefts per 100,000 people, based on 2022 data.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago

The cynical explanation here is that the cops are in on it as are railway and dock employees (not all but enough). There is just no way this could happen at the scale its happening without some inside help.