> 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, yo

> 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.