hmmm...the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Some of it for drugs (only 15% of state and 40% federal) but you have to compare to the rest of the world. I doubt the German or UK police would be bothered to care much either. At least in the US criminals eventually get caught and arrested if they persist. the system works, but it sometimes takes longer than it should. In this case ,it's hard to make an arrest when there is no evidence but some video footage which may or may not exist or even identity the thief.
Quite the contrary, at least with austrian police. My pedelec (e-bike, worth around 4.000 €) got stolen at 3am a while ago and it had a GPS tracker.
I called the equivalent of 911 and briefly explained. The said: "wait, we pick you up", and in the same moment I hear sirens a few streets later heading in my direction. What followed was out of a movie. We raced with emergency lights to the current location, constantly updading other units on the current position. We must have missed the thief only by seconds and found construction containers where the signal was coming from. The police said they would call the construction companys 24h contact and open the containers with them, but I could go home for now.
One hour later the GPS tracker said the bike was moving again. I called again and the operator of emergency services said "didn't you call before?" and they picked me up again. When we arrived at the - now outdoor - location of the bike, there were 5 police cars and 15 police around it, but no thief, it was locked to a regular bike stand. They called in the equivalent of SWAT to open the lock and I got my bike back. They took fingerprints of the lock and luckily the thief stopped at an residential address for a minute or two, so we figured that might be the home address. Investigation is ongoing.
I could more or less prove that I was the owner by having the dealers invoice, serial number and pictures on my phone btw.
I was really shocked by a friend in Los Angeles that was mugged at gun point from their car and the police did essentially nothing.
The audience here on Hacker News has a pretty realistic idea of how quickly you can track down the location of people using a set of credit cards that are known-- not to mention two phones which were also stolen and shockingly not powered down. I am not saying that the process is infallible, but there are companies I have worked for where you could have given the known information (phones, credit cards) and they could have tracked down the location in real time with a 70-80% certainty.
Catching car jackers with a 70% certainty (or 33% even) will shut down a car jacking ring pretty quick. This sort of crime is exploding in Los Angeles this year.
That the police don't try as hard to track a person down as a mobile ad server would, makes me wonder about the incentives to curb crime.
The only solution I have found for preventing thefts from my construction sites in St. Louis is to pay a stipend to local economically disadvantaged people to live at the site, and provide firearms for the purpose of discouraging thieves. At the request of the St. Louis city police, we stopped reporting incidents of attempted theft.
The DA in my area recently stopped attending murder trials. This is what the powers that be want. When the prosecutor does not show up in court, the case cannot proceed.
Yes, there is a substantial portion of the population that believes it is inhumane for the police to arrest a black man if he does not really feel like being arrested.
I'm convinced that the solution to crime is not to increase punishments, but to make the speed and likelihood of being punished fast and almost certain.
If theft had a 100% detection rate and a punishment greater than the value of the item, you would never steal anything because it would be pointless. The problem is we let people get away with it multiple times and then eventually destroy their lives over it.
Airtags and other anti theft tech can help here. Make theft extremely difficult to get away with and people will not bother.
> I'm convinced that the solution to crime is not to increase punishments, but to make the speed and likelihood of being punished fast and almost certain.
This is the orthodox view among experts in the subject, so yes
What you just described is far costlier on society (assuming these efforts would be covered with taxes) and likely requires severe invasions of privacy, especially considering theft can be both physical and digital/virtual.
All in all, I’d rather not aim for 100% detection + swift punishment as the improvement metrics for deterring theft.
Several technologies like the airtags and account locks on electronics have done much for stopping theft. The iphone can now act as an airtag while turned off.
The thing is, even if you spend more initially on stopping crime, it will eventually drop off as people work out you can no longer get away with it. Spend the extra cash collecting all the security video and know it will teach one person that they can not get away with theft and that person will likely communicate it with their peers.
I would personally rather spend $600 extra in tax for police over having the negative feelings of a $500 item being stolen.
I don't believe much in terms of privacy has to be lost as most of the time we already have the data, we just don't have the human resources to do anything with it.
I'm amazed that whenever there's mention of using data to solve crimes HN thinks it's invasion of privacy, yet majority work in tech companies that collect and sell massive amounts of personal data to sell ads.
>I'm convinced that the solution to crime is not to increase punishments, but to make the speed and likelihood of being punished fast and almost certain.
You apply that to every Karen's favorite pet laws and suddenly we're all living in 1984.
Look at the opinions of HN for example. You've got a subset of people who think speeding should be a shoot on sight offense. And you've got a subset of people who think littering should be a shoot on sight offense. You've got a subset of people who think that anyone who uses power equipment before 10AM is Literally Hitler(TM). I'm being only slightly hyperbolic here. It all adds up. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Which is why a huge swath of laws need to be thrown out. The majority of our governments are tyrannically inhumane. If a law is not going to be enforced, remove it from the books.
People advocate for these "shoot on sight" punishments because they are sick of offenders getting away with things. Light but certain punishments would fix this. If there was a $50 fine for speeding but you have an almost 100% chance of getting caught, this would be more effective (I think) than a $400 fine which takes months of offending to be caught.
> I doubt the German or UK police would be bothered to care much either.
I have as close as it gets to a perfect comparison. My now-wife was working on a summer school in the UK, shepherding American teenagers around. A few had their iPhones stolen, but with exact location information via “find my phone”. Police did nothing.
It’s a bit sad when mostly they just had to turn up.
That's a non-excuse when training the police on the existence of a location tracking feature for loss/theft prevention takes so little time.
Since Android and iPhone make up the vast majority of the smartphone market, and modern devices on both sides have "Find My" style features, it feels like something they aught to know about.
The police know to look for a serial number on a drone/bicycle/vehicle so why not the equivalent for phones?
Sure, but first you have to "sell" the person on the idea, otherwise it's just more "we enhanced the killer's IP address and downloaded their RAM using coding and algorithms"
If "high incarceration rate in large part due to micromanagement of what people do to their bodies" doesn't support the point of the person you're replying to I don't know what does.
> I doubt the German or UK police would be bothered to care much either. At least in the US criminals eventually get caught and arrested if they persist.
Do US really has higher clearance rates and lower criminality as your comment implies or is that just a guess?
The US does not have a special high clearance rate. It's not better than typical for the OECD.
Its general crime rates are also roughly typical - median - for the OECD (including for most types of violent crime), except for murder of course as everyone knows.
