This is very doable when what you're dealing with is a Major Crime That Gets Full Institutional and Individual Attention.
What about a bike theft, a jacked car or a stolen parcel though?
There is a price to having information easily available to the law enforcement. There is a price to not having this information easily available to the law enforcement too.
Yes, many cases of people calling the police with actual tracker data showing exactly where their stolen property is, and the response being to get laughed at and told it's not a priority.
That entirely varies by locality. My parents just had their vehicle broken into and their credit and debit cards stolen (in addition to some cash) and the local police department visited the grocery store where the thief used the cards to buy gift cards multiple times to collect security footage to try and track them down (the grocery store store’s security lead was out the first time on vacation). If your local police department won’t do this and you want them to, ask your community to raise taxes to hire more and/or better cops.
Doesn't matter, they should have to follow the same process.
Cops, at least where I live, don't give af about any of those crimes though. Bike gets stolen? You'll be lucky if they even show up at all, let alone do anything about it, surveillance data available or not. They largely don't even get prosecuted when caught.
This depends on what evidence there is. If it's just "omg, bike was here yesterday, but is not here today, find it!" then what are they really going to do? They are not calling a CSI team and collect fibers from the scene, this is not a TV show.
In my experience, the police will follow the leads if they have them. I had several bikes stolen by homeless so they hid them in some commercial property few blocks away. One bike had a tracker, which they found and disabled but they did it near where they ultimately hid the bikes. Using the last location from the tracker cops were able to find the bikes and return them. If there were cameras they might be able to also find the perps and put them to jail.
The majority of crime is committed by a relatively small number of individuals. If citizens feel crime is out of control they need to vote in politicians and judges who sentence repeat offenders to long sentences or involuntary commitment.
Long sentences are far less effective than reliable enforcement. Something that seems to be very true in practice. If you steal or vandalise something in China, there is an extremely high chance you will get caught, you won't get a massive penalty, but it will be enough to cover the damages + some.
If you for example knew that stealing had a penalty of 100% of the item value + 10% fine, with a 100% chance of getting caught, you'd never steal anything again even though the penalty is so much smaller than what it is currently in most countries. And then if you make a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement, it won't ruin your life.
Long sentences and reliable enforcement are complimentary.
If you can reliably prosecute the repeat offenders you catch, and put them behind bars for a long time? You stop them from committing more crimes. The crime rate falls, and the amount of enforcement manpower you have available per crime rises. Making it easier to catch and prosecute the remaining offenders.
Most of the low level crime isn't done by "a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement". It's done by someone who has done it 5 times before and will do it again. Unless jailed, that is. The jail doesn't fix whatever's wrong with them, but it is hard to keep doing crimes while behind bars.
For violent crime sure. But for theft if you can just consistently recover the loss + a penalty it will do so much more to discourage it than simply raising the penalty.
That's for theft specifically. Most thefts are committed by repeat offenders.
You are making a very common mistake of assuming that criminals are prone to making good decisions.
If they were, they probably wouldn't offend the first time. And almost certainly wouldn't reoffend - once the costs of getting caught are clear to them.
"Consistently" is not very realistic without a way of making repeat offenders stop reoffending. You need the level of law enforcement to completely overpower the crime rate - and that means either getting better funded, better staffed, better equipped, more professional enforcement, or lowering crime rates. "We need to overfund the police" is expensive and unpopular, "we need to give the police more surveillance powers" is extremely unpopular, and there are very few ways of getting lower crime rates. Jail bars, however, are a proven one.
Of course you could still rack up a large penalty / jail time if you cause an incredible amount of damage quickly, but in general you'd catch people before they get that far. Catching a bike thief after the first 1-2 bikes rather than when they have stolen 100.
Is that true? USA seems to have long sentences and a high incarceration rate, yet still has high crime when compared to other countries with less incarceration.
The 4th amendment doesn’t really have much of anything to say about public surveillance; the courts have largely agreed it does not constitute a search unless it reveals information that is not intended to be public (such as the thermal imaging of buildings) or reveals intimate personal information (such as documentation of habits through long term data aggregation).
They can get a subpoena for that, too. The bike and the parcel are already long gone by the time police do anything. (Nor will they do anything other than file a report if you are lucky.)
What about a bike theft, a jacked car or a stolen parcel though?
There is a price to having information easily available to the law enforcement. There is a price to not having this information easily available to the law enforcement too.