In the US we have all of the downside of surveillance with none of the upside. Other places with competent police have vanishingly low crime rates. Crime is deterred because there’s little chance of getting away with it.
In the US we still have domestic spying and facial recognition at airports but somehow car theft is still possible. In the Bay Area people even openly shoplift.
You believe that no other factor explains the difference better? The reason is "incompetent police"? Why did the US not have the same problem in the past? You would explain it as somehow, across the entire country, all police, at all levels, just become incompetent sometime in the last generation? Why don't you list some of the other countries that you believe have things figured out, and we can see what they have in common, other than "competent police"?
> somehow, across the entire country, all police, at all levels, just become incompetent sometime in the last generation
It isn’t as far-fetched as you make it sound. If the incentives stop rewarding competence, then people focus on other stuff instead.
This seems inline with the general decay we’ve seen across the Western world where actually doing work and doing it well has a lower ROI than engaging in shenanigans to artificially boost one’s earnings such as office politics, fraud, etc. A certain airplane maker recently got to see the end result for example.
The cops were even worse before. The crime wave of the 80s and 90s was way worse than what we have now and that was just the continuation . We’ve always had this problem.
In those "other places" the causation is opposite, the crime doesn't need to be deterred because it's treated as a systemic issue which is solved through social safety nets and other egalitarian measures.
Look at what the NYPD is doing right now, they spend $6 billion a year. They're spending millions more to claw back 5 figures in lost subway fares. That's tax payer highway robbery.
Atlanta recently rolled their helicopter out (at least $60k per sortie) to catch a guy who shoplifted $100 from Walmart. Something's clearly not working here.
The police are only as competent as the laws are. If the criminals know that they will be released the same day with no consequences then there is no point in catching them.
> The police are only as competent as the laws are.
The police are (often deliberately and strategically) far less competent at achieving the goals of the laws than the laws, assuming good-faith enforcement, themselves permit them to be.
Wait, are the criminals catching something in your talking point? Why would the criminals thinking that they will be released with no consequences stop the police doing what the taxpayers pay them to do?
If you park in the Mission District, chances are someone’s gonna smash your window and grab your stuff. Calling the cops? Eh, don’t expect much. They show up late or not at all, and even if they catch someone, they're out again fast. So, what’s the point?
Top rated answer:
>> Give criminals more hefty punishments because they are usually not put in jail for long and charges are often dropped. Usually when arrested the same offenders are smashing and grabbing again right after release.
I don’t think you addressed the point that it is the job of the police to apprehend those who break the law. It should not matter what happens after that as that is not what the tax payers are paying them to do. Is it ok that the police are not doing their job any longer? Is this behavior of theirs positively or negatively affecting crime?
When you won't sacrifice for society, no one else will either.
You are statistically probably well educated, probably working in tech, and probably earning 2x or more than a police officer with none of the danger. As a tech person, you could probably trivially write a query that would tell you what camera to look at at what moment, or have the engineering background to develop a system to find where people fence bikes and stolen laptops.
Instead you're probably making some asshole VC or CEO richer by selling out the future for next quarters profits. That police officer actually has skin in the game making society a better place and is literally in harms way when they do their job.
You think the government owes you something, but what I don't think you fully realize is that the government is us; we are the government, you and I.
I apologize for lack of a link or hard data, but I read somewhere that statistically speaking it's more dangerous to be married to a police officer than to be police officer. Lines up with numerous articles on domestic violence committed by members of law enforcement.
I think this misses the point. It’s not that the government doesn’t have the resources or the capability, and we just need to step up and help. They do. They can and do buy cell phone location data, ad tech data, and all other sorts of bespoke data like car tire pressure unique IDs. All of this created by well-paid Silicon Valley companies and aggregated by no-name government contracting companies like Anomaly 6, VenTel and Babel Street. The reason it’s not put to better use is that the US can’t figure out whether we have a right to privacy (in which case the government needs to knock it off) or whether we should prefer safety.
The reason I post this is because I read it this morning and it's the first thing that pretty much popped in my head here. You guys have a huge gap in policing and enforcement of punishment. It's so blatantly broken and broken on purpose by the left/establishment/politicans/etc.
30-40x murder rate is wildly incorrect. According to 2022 stats I found, Singapore had 7 murders for a pop of 5.6mil (1.25/mil) and NYC had 30 for a pop of 8mil (3.75/mil)... that's 3x.
Maybe that's just fewer guns and better mental health supports (whether official or cultural).
Heh what is even worse about crime reporting in the US is the news never really reports on crime rates in small cities and suburban areas. You'll see people arguing online how NYC or whatever big city is a hive of scum and villiany and completely miss the small town they live in has a higher per capita crime rate. It's all a bunch of rage bait built on if it bleeds it leads.
I honestly think the stats are being twisted and a lot of crime goes un-reported, hence the appearance of crime going down. As much as I hate the media and their constant call-to-outrage, some aspect of what they're now doing is trying to inform people that "there's a problem here".
To keep drivers safe, all cars sold after 2007 in the United States are required by law to have a Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS) installed.
Most TPMS sensors have a battery life of 5–10 years.
Although a unique ID can be used to avoid other TPMS sensor’s messages on the road, this unique ID can also be used by an attacker to track a vehicle’s movements.
This ID is broadcasted unencrypted and, therefore can be used to track when a particular vehicle has passed nearby.
Seems like a really tricky shot to land since the only way to aim the device is by pointing the patrol car at the target vehicle.
It's still many years away, but I could see specialty homing drones doing a better job of this. By that point, remote disabling of vehicles might be mandatory.
I've seen them used multiple times during live cop shows.
In one instance, they were using a dart that had a huge magnet on it so as soon as it hit the trunk, it stuck really well and all the cops backed off and they then had a chopper follow the car back to the owners house where they made an arrest later in the program.
In another instance, the guys clearly knew what the cops did, because he ducked off the highway into a residential area where the cops had several calls of a car that pulled into their neighborhood at a high rate and four dudes jumped out like a clown car while the car was still in drive, which then ran over one of the residents mailboxes. They got three of the guys within minutes as they swarmed the area, set up a perimeter and boxed them and then brought in the K-9.
Even the cop said car thief's know the cops are using this tech and since they were also using the magnet, it makes a very loud "thud" when it attaches to the car's frame and thieves now will ditch the car and go out on foot to try and get away, making it far more easier to catch them as opposed to having to do pit maneuvers or other high risk moves to end a chase.
> By that point, remote disabling of vehicles might be mandatory.
Congratulations, you've created a massive black market in the US. If the penalties are stiff enough to actually prevent people disabling it, you've massively increased the prison population, too.
Most people with enough shit to lose to own a car won't throw themselves on the grenade of going to prison over this.
The ones that would are either pro-cop (and are willing to overlook an incredible amount of police overreach and abuse, as long as it's directed against the right people), or the counter-culture antifa types that get demonized by the press, and are hated and feared by the first group.
I suppose there's also a few comfortably-privileged libertarian types that talk a big game about these issues, but when push comes to shove, don't actually push.
In this day and age, a gps tracker on a car is outdated tech. People carry phones with them that have much better geolocating devices than whatever these police departments can buy off the shelf.
People are crying foul about “dystopian” nanny state. In reality, that worst case scenario has already come to life. Except it’s not the government, it’s private entities vacuuming up all of your data. Your phone, your “smart car”, IoT devices, your smart home, various free software, emails, voice recordings, search history, watched video history, social media engagements, purchase history. All of these possible vectors. It’s all packaged up, and sold to advertisers or used to train LLM models.
Even the government entities have been caught buying up private data [1]
September 11, 2001 (2001-09-11) — changed the game on privacy. PATRIOT Act is awful.
It will be interesting what the counter-surveillance will be like. The dart has to be adhered well enough that the speedster can’t get a lead on their pursuers, jump out, rip the dart off, and chuck it into the back of a UPS truck.
I mean, aren't we kind of at a point where "predicted in Xyz science fiction novel" is a bit passe? Mankind is currently grappling with absolutely wild developments from every direction: the advent of AI, the collapse of birthrates globally, the advent of quantum cryptography threatening to make everybody's internet activity an open book, and the collapse of global ecosystems.
If anything, Neal Stephenson did nothing more than mention a simple idea that was practically laying on the ground in broad daylight, and technology finally caught up to the point where it's implementable and deployable.
> aren't we kind of at a point where "predicted in Xyz science fiction novel" is a bit passe?
No. Plenty are wrong. And both science fiction and the technological frontier are constantly advancing. Your argument is close to those who argue everything was predicted in their holy book of choice.
The Diamond Age published in 1995? An idea that's 60 year+ old?
The Diamond Age had specialized drones to shoot them and used barbs and nanotech - "When they were shot out of the tag stat's nose, they sprouted cruel barbs at the nose and a simple empennage"
The hard part is when you miss you don't hid a kid walking to school in the skull and kill or blind them.
The Diamond Age invented "magic", then missuses it constantly (vacuums and hydrogen/helium at normal atmosphere are all about the same). There is not much to see there for predictions, it's fun fiction.
Maybe the old ideas of publicly chopping off a hand for theft were the best. One way or another it will prevent car theft. Even if simply by making it hard to drive a stolen car away hands-free.
It seems to me that, at least when talking about crimes that harm others, criminality isn’t curable; the kind of person who cause others harm isn’t just going to stop because someone told them “no” or gave some kind of punishment.
That's not how any of this works. Criminals generally have poor executive function but plenty of non criminals also do as well. The strongest predictors are situational, and we do everything we can to ensure they can't escape those situations by branding them for life with a criminal record and providing little to no opportunity for improvement.
I’d argue that once those situational factors have created a criminal, it’s an irreversible process — you have someone who has been irrevocably transformed into a problem.
To reduce crime those situational factors need to be fixed before the criminal is created.
In the US we still have domestic spying and facial recognition at airports but somehow car theft is still possible. In the Bay Area people even openly shoplift.