I've come to believe that acceptance of crime is a choice by officials. Many low level crimes I've witnessed are trivial to catch. For instance, find out where porch thieves like to hit. Plant a package there and park a patrol car there for a few hours and chances are you'll catch someone. Or put in a tracker. A cop can get a bike stolen in hours in the right neighborhoods in NYC.
If a youtuber can park their car with a ps4 in the trunk and record someone breaking in just a few hours later, I don't see why police can't do this.
And it's only a handful of people engaged in this low level crime. Arrest a few. And if they have a dozen prior arrests, like many of them do, keep them in jail for a while. And if they're doing anti-social crimes like punching random women in the street, remove them from society and let them cool off for a few years (it's almost always 18-29 yos).
Soon the economics doesn't make sense or the worst are spending their most chaotic years in prison. It's quite simple and effective. But for whatever reason, police or prosecutors are uninterested in stopping this type of crime.
I think it's because policing in general is not at the standard it once was. Currently police are only rewarded for "big busts", but it's the smaller crimes that make all the difference to the individual.
In the UK for example, only something like 4% of burglaries get investigated at all. We're talking about the police not turning up at all. A neighbour down the street had a car stolen from their drive, under no less than four very high resolution cameras, and the police refused to even watch it or receive a link to it.
At best now, you can get a 'crime reference number', which then automatically times out when they fail to investigate it. The general response from police with theft is "claim it on your insurance" or "speak to the seller". It has never been a better time to commit a crime.
Having your items stolen after buying them with your highly taxed income is like a new tax being applied. I think we are edging towards societal collapse in the West. Nothing works correctly any more, and we still pay high taxes for the service.
In the US it is because District Attorneys have an explicit, open policy of not prosecuting petty crime. That has led to police not investigating or arresting, because there is no point.
Wasn’t this the broken windows philosophy that may or may not have reduced crime in NYC in the mid 90s?
It seems like cracking down on low level crime should reduce bigger crimes, but the research seems to become politicized based on who instituted the policy.
> because policing in general is not at the standard it once was. Currently police are only rewarded for "big busts"
Sure. The point is this is a matter of policy. Someone's policy. Some people in there (1) choose to prioritize this or that, (2) choose to reward doing nothing, (3) choose to promote those who do that, etc, (all the way to) actively protect cops who are active nuisances themselves.
This does not "just happen" except in the sense of "it has become acceptable". Accepted by whom? Voters at some point? But not always. In the US, most cops are extremely well insulated from the voters. And they haven't had to care about your standards for a long time. If ever really.
That doesn't pay. Pulling over a citizen with a job and citing them for speeding is a much more lucrative use of their time. Both are against the law, so they're doing their job either way. Kind of.
Although as another commenter noted, I've noticed they've become strangely lax about even citing moving violations since Covid. Makes you wonder what they are even doing, then.
I don't even think that it's lucrative per se, but rather that it's straightforward. Cop sits there playing candy crush, magical radar artifact makes a noise, they look up, chase down that car, then check a box on a pre-printed citation where they don't even have to think about which law to cite. But (real example) same road, clearly marked as trucks prohibited from left two lanes - a shed larger than many houses meanders by in the third lane, hanging well over into both the second and leftmost lanes - where do they even start? If the cop even happened to look up from their phone at the right time, they'd have to figure out which specific laws are being broken, how to cite them, what to take down as evidence, probably show up to the court date themselves, etc. So the actual hazardous moving violation goes unpoliced meanwhile every driver merely going the prevailing speed of the road has to spend a large part of their attention looking out for highway robbers laying in wait.
> Pulling over a citizen with a job and citing them for speeding is a much more lucrative use of their time
The solution may be in segregating the police from the traffic cops.
Policework is dangerous and specialised. Its officers need a lot of training and good pay. Traffic cops are basically humans trained to be cameras, inasmuchas 90% of what they do can be automated.
My understanding is that moving violations are perceived as high risk, low reward.
(1) The stop is dangerous because you don't know who the vehicle occupants are. If the driver is medium bad and runs, the public has low appetite for high speed pursuits that may cause collateral damage or put the public in danger. There's also the chance it's a very bad guy... someone in a stolen vehicle with a warrant out for a murder charge. Are they going to just give up and come quietly? Probably not.
(2) For a given region there is a list of things that the DA and/or judges are perceived as being soft on. There's little/no appetite from LEO to apprehend bad guy who is just going to be back out on the street a short time later.
So to the LEO, you want me to pull people over for speeding, but if it's a medium bad person they flee -> no pursuit allowed, and if it's a very bad person maybe they attack me? No thx, I'll wait for dispatch to call.
I think you are right that it is a small number of people committing these low level crimes repeatedly and they are causing huge amounts of unrest and unhappiness.
In the Bay Area I bet arresting ~100 individuals would send the number of car break ins, shoplifting and muggings sharply down. It is crazy that we let a tiny group make literally millions of people live defensively because we are unwilling to arrest them.
Some public schools have played around with the idea of "performance-based" compensation, where teachers get paid more if they deliver better outcomes (unfortunately generally measured by standardized test scores) than would be expected on average, given the students coming in. This is mean to be about a 'value add', so teachers in schools with high socio-economic status students who were already going to score well don't get automatically paid more -- it's about an estimated 'improvement'.
I'm broadly aware that some health policy people want providers to be paid for caring for patients, not on a per-procedure basis. Get paid more for keeping your patients healthy and living longer, not for racking up more visits.
Does such a thing exist for policing? I think critically we need a mechanism for collecting crime stats that isn't fully dependent on the police themselves -- but at a high level, paying police to reduce actual crime, and shrinking their budget when crime actually increases, seems like a path to at least get what we pay for.
In California, state law holds that stealing merchandise worth $950 or less is just a misdemeanor, which means that law enforcement probably won’t bother to investigate, and if they do, prosecutors will let it go. Most packages are probably under the $950 threshold, so there is no enforcement. Why bother investigating and arresting when the DA won't prosecute and they'll be let out immediately?
Although to be fair, wasn't / isn't a lot of this "why bother" actually a political protest and retaliation against that DA and the citizenry that elected them? Not even doing something else with their time, but not doing much? And to be fair again, the joke in San Francisco is that "not doing anything" is a safer alternative for some of the population. Safer than "doing something else". This is messed up every which way.
> And it's only a handful of people engaged in this low level crime. Arrest a few. And if they have a dozen prior arrests, like many of them do, keep them in jail for a while. And if they're doing anti-social crimes like punching random women in the street, remove them from society and let them cool off for a few years (it's almost always 18-29 yos).
I think you're underestimating how much crime there is and how many people do it.
The number of heroin users in the UK is about 3x that nation's entire prison population, for example.
I think it heavily depends on what local district attorneys policies are. Police may not see a point in taking a risk by apprehending someone just for them to be released hours later anyway.
Not a huge fan of US police departments in general but this isn't necessarily all on them.
One contributor is the fact that law enforcement rarely strikes but used their FOP and “union” organizations to slow, or sandbag work as a negotiation tactic. With membership that is largely unaccountable the blue wall is a political tool to leverage public funds by threat of crime and alternatively allowing or shutting down private unionization efforts.
You are right about that, friend in Nevada county had his house broken into, guy stole some stuff including a rifle, drank one of his beers. Cops came dusted for prints, took the empty beer can. And nothing came of it.
Two years later gets a call from a detective they got the guy. He got arrested they took his DNA and it was a match for the DNA on the beer can. So they charged him for the break in and stealing the rifle.
Cops in the Bay Area would never even bother with that.
I can see how this would be the natural response to a situation where the DA refuses to prosecute crime. That said, simply giving in to lawlessness is clearly not the answer, and I doubt many cops find this to be a preferable path. It just validates the DA's backwards worldview! How are you going to replace them when the elections roll around, and they're able to argue "I'm not refusing to prosecute anyone! Just look, arrests are way down!" The only way to keep them honest is to continue doing the work and ensuring that the taxpayers have a clear understanding of what is happening.
I've seen press about police departments making such an argument, and it seems really disingenuous. The implied claim is that if no charge will be pursued by the DA then there's "no outcome" or point in doing any police work or arrest.
However, when cops feel any kind of animus, it's really apparent that they can make life awful for people by harassing, intimidating, or assaulting who aren't doing anything illegal. They understand that even if the DA will never pursue anything, being a victim of over-policing is itself a shitty position to be in. Further, it can create the basis for claims of resisting arrest. For example, in my city there's press about a woman who was physically accosted by an officer for jaywalking. There's video of an officer doing a rapid U-turn after seeing a woman walk through a crosswalk, follow her down the street and slam her int a wall. The officer claims that the woman, who was just walking down the street with headphones, disregarded his (impossible?) instruction to show him an ID without reaching into her pockets or purse.
So we supposed to believe that cops have the energy to rough up random jaywalkers (who we're pretty sure the DA isn't interested in pursuing, and which is actually legal in my state now), but not enough to pursue people doing car break-ins, mail theft, vandalism, etc because of the DA's lack of interest?
If you were a mail thief, and not a priority for the local DA (... though isn't mail theft actually a federal crime?) but the police decided that you should be picked up and detained for 1-hour less than the window at which they're obliged to release you if no charges are forthcoming, and also all the stuff you stole, and some other stuff that you didn't steal, was confiscated and you didn't get your actual property back for an indeterminate period, you might understandably reconsider the pro/con list of stealing mail, even if you never went to court.
I think the explanation for why cops don't direct their harassment power at actual criminals is not that cops are rationally not doing work that won't lead to convictions. Rather:
- police budgets increase with the severity of the perceived "crime problem". Solving problems doesn't get you more money next year.
- priorities get set by political pressures. Mail theft, package theft, car break-ins, etc have diffuse harms over a broad set of the population but not necessarily against organized political blocks. But the X Neighborhood Merchants Association that donates to the campaign fund of the incumbent supervisor can probably organize to get more policing in their area.
- policing isn't about stopping or even responding to crime; it's about being seen projecting power. Report a theft in my neighborhood, and the cops will at best take a report that you can send to your insurer. If you have video footage of the crime, no one will look at it. The won't come to the location where the crime occurred. But routinely I will see 5 cops standing around talking, with 3 cop cars blocking traffic/bike lanes/lightrail tracks, while one cop is looming over/talking at a homeless person sitting on the sidewalk. There aren't enough cops to look into serial theft, but we need all hands on deck for this one disruptive unhoused person, b/c the world needs to see how we respond when you visibly step out of line.
> I've come to believe that acceptance of crime is a choice by officials. Many low level crimes I've witnessed are trivial to catch.
> And it's only a handful of people engaged in this low level crime. Arrest a few.
And if they have a dozen prior arrests, like many of them do, keep them in jail for a while.
The USA easily has the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world, and yet Americans like this say crime is out of control, and say the police and prosecutors are not putting enough people away. Their solution to this high level of crime is yet more incarceration.
Finland and Norway have a much lower rate of incarceration, and much nicer prisons, yet less crime. In fact, people don't even lock their bicycles up in Norway outside of Oslo. If you want to lower crime, ask a Finn or Norwegian how they did it. Americans just double down on what has failed them over the past half century.
> USA easily has the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world
A fifth of our prisoners are there for drug crimes [1]. We also have more pretrial detention and longer sentencing than the rest of the world.
I can't find good data for arrest (versus incarceration) rates. But I'd suspect we're closer to the median in frequency of arrest. In other words, our problem isn't arresting too many people; it's holding them in jail for too long. (Also arresting people for non-violent drug possession, which is stupid.)
> Their solution to this high level of crime is yet more incarceration.
True, more incarceration doesn't seem to fix anything. However less incarceration also does not fix anything (see downtown San Francisco).
> Finland and Norway have a much lower rate of incarceration
Finland and Norway are effectively monocultures. They don't have the same social issues we do. Look at any 1st world monoculture and you see the same low incarceration rate. Japan, Korea, Iceland, etc.
You can't just abdicate the monopoly on violence because you feel you've done enough policing this year, any more than you can stop pumping water when you feel like people have used enough, or stop processing sewage and collecting trash when you feel like people have produced enough waste. That doesn't preclude working on root causes of crime or water conservation or reducing waste. But government has to deal with the population-level behavior that it actually has - all of it, not the amount it wishes it had - or we are fundamentally not living in civilization anymore. Water stops coming out of the taps, trash piles up in the streets, and people do crimes with impunity. The Northern European societies people lionize in these types of discussions are certainly not like that.
Behavior of small populations dont translate well into bigger one. Heck, even just to different society.
Swiss have direct vote on literally anything they gather 100k signatures for, ie joining Nato, EU, banning mosques, you name it. Yet the country runs like literal swiss watch. Give same freedom to British population and immediately you have brexit.
America is made up of 5+ full fledged nations of people inside it with different ethnic, cultural, and genetic backgrounds. Why do you expect them to be anything like the Finns or Norwegians?
Most of policing is scarecrow. Deterrence is the name of the game. One time my credit card number was stolen, and they purchased airline tickets for more than $1000. I reported it, but was told nothing would happen. They already have police at the airport, I can’t imagine how it could be easier to catch the thief, but no effort was even given.
They could catch so many bad drivers (carpool lane violations and speeding mostly but lots of others too) but I see them do a sting about once every 3 years and then zero enforcement in between.
We as a society gave up on enforcing traffic rules. There are a few small towns that go overboard, then Wild West driving. Nothing in between in the Bay Area ime.
I’m getting angry. I’ve come across two wrong way drivers recently. And a woman walking on the high way at night and when I called they said “oh yea we’ve been getting calls” and that was it. Meanwhile the only time I’ve ever seen beat policing in my area was one time to question a minority walking. Apologies for venting.
a HUGE part of this is current drug-use trends. Opioids are having a sea-change impact on society. This is hugely complex, involving everything from pharma "legit" drugs, to global trade patterns & efficiencies, how we view, treat and punish drug use, the people in our communities impacted the most, and pretty much every other dimension. It's not the same thing as say, heroin, when ANYBODY could (knowingly or not)use fentanyl once and die, or become incredibly addicted so quickly.
I wish I understood the root cause of why places like SF and Oakland have given up on policing.
Is it an ideological thing (think Chesa Boudin & co), where keeping people accountable for antisocial behavior is considered a form of oppression from a more fortunate class? Or is it more of an issue with there being too much bureaucracy to be able to push any change to policing through? Or are the voters simply too eager to continue this existing self-own, and will vote for more restorative justice as the cost of their own quality of life?
The pattern seems to repeat across a lot of the more desirable parts of California like San Francisco and Santa Monica, and I wish I understood it better. Everybody's got their hot take.
- Police budgets getting slashed and police forces being reduced.
- Legislation like Prop47 (which made shoplifting of goods < $950 a misdemeanor).
- Progressive DA's refusing to prosecute low level crimes.
Individually all these changes aren't so bad and make sense on paper, but put them together in practice and it's a recipe for disaster. If you're a criminal thinking about robbing a store in SF for example, you know that:
1. The police likely won't show up so you likely won't get caught
2. Even if you do get caught, as long as you stole < $950, you get a slap on the wrist and the DA won't prosecute the crime.
Personally I think CA needs a "3 strikes" style law for low level petty crimes like shoplifting. The problem I keep hearing is that even if someone gets arrested for shoplifting, they are back out on the street the next day and there's no greater punishment for repeat offenders, so as a result you get a small group of people that do most of the crime and get arrested 50+ times per year with no consequence besides getting locked up for one night (at most).
It's ideology fueled by fabricated science. Things like drug and petty crime decriminalization have just completely failed at achieving their goals and these policies were backed by studies that have consistently failed to replicate.
The people behind these things are serious hard core ideologues. Remember Chesa Boudin? His parents were literal communist terrorists that murdered a cop while robbing a bank (when I say this I'm not misusing the term communist like many Americans do).
I had the exact same question. This seems like a much bigger crime than the story is letting on. Also, shouldn't this be handled at least jointly by a federal agency? I didn't see any mention of federal charges.
I feel like fucking with the Post Office is one of those things that sounds minor but can be a big fucking deal. Your petty theft just became a literal federal case, complete with a police force whose whole job is to protect the integrity of the mail.
Aren't there two locks? One, a master keyed lock for post office employees to fill the boxes and the other is individually keyed for customer access. Perhaps the crooks obtained a master key by either bribing an employee, cloned one, or stole one.
Back in high school a friend was obsessed with the MTA subway and had a neighbor who was an MTA employee. He somehow convinced them to hand over their keys which had both the strait and S shaped ward keys to the subway cars and the pad locks in the stations. He duplicated the warded keys using nails and sheet metal and the padlock key using just a nail and a file. We both had sets of keys and could unlock anything we wanted. All it took was one irresponsible employee handing their keys to a 16 YO.
> All it took was one irresponsible employee handing their keys to a 16 YO.
Sometimes not even. As a semi-related personal story, many years ago in university some friends and I set out to reverse-engineer the master keys.
All it took was buying 10x of the same blank from an online retailer for ~$12, cutting 6/7 positions to the same dephs of our dorm keys, then iterating the last remaining position down one depth at a time (starting from a 0-cut) in the last remaining position.
Rinse and repeat until we had iterated all 7 positions across our 7 sacrificial blanks, and with a little napkin math, we were left with the bitting for the TMK. Cut the TMK bitting onto a new blank, and we now had the literal keys to the kingdom.
Many harmless fun times were had, steam tunnels, roofs, and penthouses explored, but had we been actually malicious the potential for damage or theft would have been huge.
I think those with the skills and smarts to perform sophisticated attacks typically set their sights higher in life than petty burglary, with most actual burglars resorting to more simple means like brute-force and violence.
I'd be very surprised if these burglars picked locks on the mailboxes or duplicated postal keys instead of having found some dumb bypass born due to a simple oversight in the mailbox's design.
Ideally, they're in a building and back-loaded, in which case, they might not even be closed on the backside. Because access to the back is secured.
But for other types of boxes, like outdoor boxes, there's usually another lock along the frame that causes the entire front (or back, depending) to swing open so the mail carrier can efficiently deliver to multiple boxes.
The "key" which opens the entire PO Box "front" is extremely easy to obtain; and if you don't have one, a crowbar/lockpicks [used just once] will simultaneously open entire ~250 box panels.
Just do a search for "The Lock Picking Lawyer," you'll have loads of fun seeing what he can do, sometimes with the most minimal of tools (like a thin strip of metal cut from a soda can).
Most PO Box locks can be opened and then closed without trace with a flathead screwdriver. They’re usually just cheap little insert locks held in place by a nut.
I'm glad the sheriff actually did something, my experience with a stolen Apple Watch has been that police will not act if the location is a multi-floor multi-unit dwelling (e.g. a house converted into a duplex), since they don't know which unit to issue a search warrant for and won't issue one for the entire building.
The underlying issue here is that AirTags do not provide any sort of altitude information. The X/Y resolution is fine grained enough to identify an apartment, but it's not possible to determine what floor it's on without you going in person and using FindMy yourself there, on site, which may be unsafe.
Police may provide an escort for you for this, but you have to be persistent and on top of it, they won't follow up with you.
Sounds like the victim got lucky that the thieves were in a relatively small town. I can't imagine SFPD taking you seriously if you said "someone stole my thing and here is the pin on my map where they are."
AirTags don't really provide any information at all except for a periodic 32-bit BLE beacon for any iPhones (or iWhatevers) that may be nearby, and sometimes participation in some fairly magic (largely undocumented) UWB RF tricks in Precision Finding mode with a compatible device.
The AirTag itself has no idea where it is. It doesn't have GPS or any other ways for it to determine its own location. It has essentially nothing to provide.
Stealing things is illegal in every state - yes.
However, stealing mail is a federal crime. There is a difference between stealing UPS package and stealing USPS package.
I never lived in a country where the delivery guy just leaves your shit out in the open. Why is this common in the US, when in most "safe" EU countries, people would never trust such a practice? Seems like an anti-consumer practice enforced by industry on the consumer.
No, packages should not be stolen from people's porch. But realistically, it's very hard to stop this crime of opportunity.
It depends where you live. I get stuff left by my door or garage or in the mailbox all the time and I would absolutely hate it if signatures were always required or if I had to go somewhere to pick up a package multiple times a week.
I have rarely had things misdelivered and the neighbor has gotten it to me. It's just not a problem in a lot of places in the US.
Many apartment complexes do have packages delivered to USPS lockboxes attached to the mailboxes or increasingly Amazon Lockers.
In other cases delivery people can open an exterior door to access a hallway or ante-room that connects to individual residences and contains mailboxes and lockers. Or they might just leave the package there. Theft by a neighbor in the same building is vanishingly uncommon.
But for larger items (or if delivery is to a house), it's common to just leave them at your door or on the porch (or just inside the outer door if possible). In some places this might be a theft risk (porch piracy), but in most it's just not.
If you're worried, just request verified delivery so you have to sign for it. Today we have informed delivery services so you get alerted that a package is coming your way and can request that it be signed for yourself, even if you don't know who sent it.
in this case, it was stolen from her post office box, a small locker with a key. and fwiw, I've never had a package stolen, but we also live in a good area, and the packages are out in the open. Sometimes they will be set behind a railing. We came home from a vacation once to like 15 packages piled up
Readit News
If a youtuber can park their car with a ps4 in the trunk and record someone breaking in just a few hours later, I don't see why police can't do this.
And it's only a handful of people engaged in this low level crime. Arrest a few. And if they have a dozen prior arrests, like many of them do, keep them in jail for a while. And if they're doing anti-social crimes like punching random women in the street, remove them from society and let them cool off for a few years (it's almost always 18-29 yos).
Soon the economics doesn't make sense or the worst are spending their most chaotic years in prison. It's quite simple and effective. But for whatever reason, police or prosecutors are uninterested in stopping this type of crime.
In the UK for example, only something like 4% of burglaries get investigated at all. We're talking about the police not turning up at all. A neighbour down the street had a car stolen from their drive, under no less than four very high resolution cameras, and the police refused to even watch it or receive a link to it.
At best now, you can get a 'crime reference number', which then automatically times out when they fail to investigate it. The general response from police with theft is "claim it on your insurance" or "speak to the seller". It has never been a better time to commit a crime.
Having your items stolen after buying them with your highly taxed income is like a new tax being applied. I think we are edging towards societal collapse in the West. Nothing works correctly any more, and we still pay high taxes for the service.
https://crownschool.uchicago.edu/news-events/magazine/leadin...
It seems like cracking down on low level crime should reduce bigger crimes, but the research seems to become politicized based on who instituted the policy.
Sure. The point is this is a matter of policy. Someone's policy. Some people in there (1) choose to prioritize this or that, (2) choose to reward doing nothing, (3) choose to promote those who do that, etc, (all the way to) actively protect cops who are active nuisances themselves.
This does not "just happen" except in the sense of "it has become acceptable". Accepted by whom? Voters at some point? But not always. In the US, most cops are extremely well insulated from the voters. And they haven't had to care about your standards for a long time. If ever really.
Dead Comment
Although as another commenter noted, I've noticed they've become strangely lax about even citing moving violations since Covid. Makes you wonder what they are even doing, then.
The solution may be in segregating the police from the traffic cops.
Policework is dangerous and specialised. Its officers need a lot of training and good pay. Traffic cops are basically humans trained to be cameras, inasmuchas 90% of what they do can be automated.
(1) The stop is dangerous because you don't know who the vehicle occupants are. If the driver is medium bad and runs, the public has low appetite for high speed pursuits that may cause collateral damage or put the public in danger. There's also the chance it's a very bad guy... someone in a stolen vehicle with a warrant out for a murder charge. Are they going to just give up and come quietly? Probably not.
(2) For a given region there is a list of things that the DA and/or judges are perceived as being soft on. There's little/no appetite from LEO to apprehend bad guy who is just going to be back out on the street a short time later.
So to the LEO, you want me to pull people over for speeding, but if it's a medium bad person they flee -> no pursuit allowed, and if it's a very bad person maybe they attack me? No thx, I'll wait for dispatch to call.
https://www.police1.com/traffic-patrol/articles/police-resea...
https://www.wcax.com/2022/01/13/prosecutor-takes-aim-chitten...
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2021/06/stop-start-or-c...
https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/11nbnxw/san_f...
In the Bay Area I bet arresting ~100 individuals would send the number of car break ins, shoplifting and muggings sharply down. It is crazy that we let a tiny group make literally millions of people live defensively because we are unwilling to arrest them.
I'm broadly aware that some health policy people want providers to be paid for caring for patients, not on a per-procedure basis. Get paid more for keeping your patients healthy and living longer, not for racking up more visits.
Does such a thing exist for policing? I think critically we need a mechanism for collecting crime stats that isn't fully dependent on the police themselves -- but at a high level, paying police to reduce actual crime, and shrinking their budget when crime actually increases, seems like a path to at least get what we pay for.
[1] https://www.reneaflores.com/criminal-defense/theft-crimes/mi...
Although to be fair, wasn't / isn't a lot of this "why bother" actually a political protest and retaliation against that DA and the citizenry that elected them? Not even doing something else with their time, but not doing much? And to be fair again, the joke in San Francisco is that "not doing anything" is a safer alternative for some of the population. Safer than "doing something else". This is messed up every which way.
I think you're underestimating how much crime there is and how many people do it.
The number of heroin users in the UK is about 3x that nation's entire prison population, for example.
Not a huge fan of US police departments in general but this isn't necessarily all on them.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-po...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapo...
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/06/police-unions-spend...
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/historic...
Two years later gets a call from a detective they got the guy. He got arrested they took his DNA and it was a match for the DNA on the beer can. So they charged him for the break in and stealing the rifle.
Cops in the Bay Area would never even bother with that.
Should this not be the expectation for low-level/nonviolent offenses, under the presumption of innocence?
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However, when cops feel any kind of animus, it's really apparent that they can make life awful for people by harassing, intimidating, or assaulting who aren't doing anything illegal. They understand that even if the DA will never pursue anything, being a victim of over-policing is itself a shitty position to be in. Further, it can create the basis for claims of resisting arrest. For example, in my city there's press about a woman who was physically accosted by an officer for jaywalking. There's video of an officer doing a rapid U-turn after seeing a woman walk through a crosswalk, follow her down the street and slam her int a wall. The officer claims that the woman, who was just walking down the street with headphones, disregarded his (impossible?) instruction to show him an ID without reaching into her pockets or purse.
So we supposed to believe that cops have the energy to rough up random jaywalkers (who we're pretty sure the DA isn't interested in pursuing, and which is actually legal in my state now), but not enough to pursue people doing car break-ins, mail theft, vandalism, etc because of the DA's lack of interest?
If you were a mail thief, and not a priority for the local DA (... though isn't mail theft actually a federal crime?) but the police decided that you should be picked up and detained for 1-hour less than the window at which they're obliged to release you if no charges are forthcoming, and also all the stuff you stole, and some other stuff that you didn't steal, was confiscated and you didn't get your actual property back for an indeterminate period, you might understandably reconsider the pro/con list of stealing mail, even if you never went to court.
I think the explanation for why cops don't direct their harassment power at actual criminals is not that cops are rationally not doing work that won't lead to convictions. Rather:
- police budgets increase with the severity of the perceived "crime problem". Solving problems doesn't get you more money next year.
- priorities get set by political pressures. Mail theft, package theft, car break-ins, etc have diffuse harms over a broad set of the population but not necessarily against organized political blocks. But the X Neighborhood Merchants Association that donates to the campaign fund of the incumbent supervisor can probably organize to get more policing in their area.
- policing isn't about stopping or even responding to crime; it's about being seen projecting power. Report a theft in my neighborhood, and the cops will at best take a report that you can send to your insurer. If you have video footage of the crime, no one will look at it. The won't come to the location where the crime occurred. But routinely I will see 5 cops standing around talking, with 3 cop cars blocking traffic/bike lanes/lightrail tracks, while one cop is looming over/talking at a homeless person sitting on the sidewalk. There aren't enough cops to look into serial theft, but we need all hands on deck for this one disruptive unhoused person, b/c the world needs to see how we respond when you visibly step out of line.
https://missionlocal.org/2024/08/black-woman-injured-by-sfpd...
> And it's only a handful of people engaged in this low level crime. Arrest a few. And if they have a dozen prior arrests, like many of them do, keep them in jail for a while.
The USA easily has the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world, and yet Americans like this say crime is out of control, and say the police and prosecutors are not putting enough people away. Their solution to this high level of crime is yet more incarceration.
Finland and Norway have a much lower rate of incarceration, and much nicer prisons, yet less crime. In fact, people don't even lock their bicycles up in Norway outside of Oslo. If you want to lower crime, ask a Finn or Norwegian how they did it. Americans just double down on what has failed them over the past half century.
A fifth of our prisoners are there for drug crimes [1]. We also have more pretrial detention and longer sentencing than the rest of the world.
I can't find good data for arrest (versus incarceration) rates. But I'd suspect we're closer to the median in frequency of arrest. In other words, our problem isn't arresting too many people; it's holding them in jail for too long. (Also arresting people for non-violent drug possession, which is stupid.)
[1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing
The conditions of these situations may be more starkly different than you realise.
True, more incarceration doesn't seem to fix anything. However less incarceration also does not fix anything (see downtown San Francisco).
> Finland and Norway have a much lower rate of incarceration
Finland and Norway are effectively monocultures. They don't have the same social issues we do. Look at any 1st world monoculture and you see the same low incarceration rate. Japan, Korea, Iceland, etc.
Swiss have direct vote on literally anything they gather 100k signatures for, ie joining Nato, EU, banning mosques, you name it. Yet the country runs like literal swiss watch. Give same freedom to British population and immediately you have brexit.
Has crime there ever been high? If not how can they tell you anything if they never had to do anything to "fix" it?
We as a society gave up on enforcing traffic rules. There are a few small towns that go overboard, then Wild West driving. Nothing in between in the Bay Area ime.
I’m getting angry. I’ve come across two wrong way drivers recently. And a woman walking on the high way at night and when I called they said “oh yea we’ve been getting calls” and that was it. Meanwhile the only time I’ve ever seen beat policing in my area was one time to question a minority walking. Apologies for venting.
I've come to believe people who make statements like this were previously chanting "ACAB".
Is it an ideological thing (think Chesa Boudin & co), where keeping people accountable for antisocial behavior is considered a form of oppression from a more fortunate class? Or is it more of an issue with there being too much bureaucracy to be able to push any change to policing through? Or are the voters simply too eager to continue this existing self-own, and will vote for more restorative justice as the cost of their own quality of life?
The pattern seems to repeat across a lot of the more desirable parts of California like San Francisco and Santa Monica, and I wish I understood it better. Everybody's got their hot take.
- Police budgets getting slashed and police forces being reduced.
- Legislation like Prop47 (which made shoplifting of goods < $950 a misdemeanor).
- Progressive DA's refusing to prosecute low level crimes.
Individually all these changes aren't so bad and make sense on paper, but put them together in practice and it's a recipe for disaster. If you're a criminal thinking about robbing a store in SF for example, you know that:
1. The police likely won't show up so you likely won't get caught
2. Even if you do get caught, as long as you stole < $950, you get a slap on the wrist and the DA won't prosecute the crime.
Personally I think CA needs a "3 strikes" style law for low level petty crimes like shoplifting. The problem I keep hearing is that even if someone gets arrested for shoplifting, they are back out on the street the next day and there's no greater punishment for repeat offenders, so as a result you get a small group of people that do most of the crime and get arrested 50+ times per year with no consequence besides getting locked up for one night (at most).
The people behind these things are serious hard core ideologues. Remember Chesa Boudin? His parents were literal communist terrorists that murdered a cop while robbing a bank (when I say this I'm not misusing the term communist like many Americans do).
How does someone like that become a DA?
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All the P.O. mailboxes I've ever seen have locks. What's going on? Was the thief actually a USPS employee?
Back in high school a friend was obsessed with the MTA subway and had a neighbor who was an MTA employee. He somehow convinced them to hand over their keys which had both the strait and S shaped ward keys to the subway cars and the pad locks in the stations. He duplicated the warded keys using nails and sheet metal and the padlock key using just a nail and a file. We both had sets of keys and could unlock anything we wanted. All it took was one irresponsible employee handing their keys to a 16 YO.
Sometimes not even. As a semi-related personal story, many years ago in university some friends and I set out to reverse-engineer the master keys.
All it took was buying 10x of the same blank from an online retailer for ~$12, cutting 6/7 positions to the same dephs of our dorm keys, then iterating the last remaining position down one depth at a time (starting from a 0-cut) in the last remaining position.
Rinse and repeat until we had iterated all 7 positions across our 7 sacrificial blanks, and with a little napkin math, we were left with the bitting for the TMK. Cut the TMK bitting onto a new blank, and we now had the literal keys to the kingdom.
Many harmless fun times were had, steam tunnels, roofs, and penthouses explored, but had we been actually malicious the potential for damage or theft would have been huge.
I think those with the skills and smarts to perform sophisticated attacks typically set their sights higher in life than petty burglary, with most actual burglars resorting to more simple means like brute-force and violence.
I'd be very surprised if these burglars picked locks on the mailboxes or duplicated postal keys instead of having found some dumb bypass born due to a simple oversight in the mailbox's design.
Ideally, they're in a building and back-loaded, in which case, they might not even be closed on the backside. Because access to the back is secured.
But for other types of boxes, like outdoor boxes, there's usually another lock along the frame that causes the entire front (or back, depending) to swing open so the mail carrier can efficiently deliver to multiple boxes.
The underlying issue here is that AirTags do not provide any sort of altitude information. The X/Y resolution is fine grained enough to identify an apartment, but it's not possible to determine what floor it's on without you going in person and using FindMy yourself there, on site, which may be unsafe.
Police may provide an escort for you for this, but you have to be persistent and on top of it, they won't follow up with you.
The AirTag itself has no idea where it is. It doesn't have GPS or any other ways for it to determine its own location. It has essentially nothing to provide.
Having to coordinate with delivery drivers is difficult if you're not home, which is often the case unless you're WFH.
Seems like every front door should be designed in some way to securely leave packages by now.
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No, packages should not be stolen from people's porch. But realistically, it's very hard to stop this crime of opportunity.
I have rarely had things misdelivered and the neighbor has gotten it to me. It's just not a problem in a lot of places in the US.
In other cases delivery people can open an exterior door to access a hallway or ante-room that connects to individual residences and contains mailboxes and lockers. Or they might just leave the package there. Theft by a neighbor in the same building is vanishingly uncommon.
But for larger items (or if delivery is to a house), it's common to just leave them at your door or on the porch (or just inside the outer door if possible). In some places this might be a theft risk (porch piracy), but in most it's just not.
If you're worried, just request verified delivery so you have to sign for it. Today we have informed delivery services so you get alerted that a package is coming your way and can request that it be signed for yourself, even if you don't know who sent it.
1) UPS guy tries to deliver package 2) nobody is home, because it is 1PM 3) I have to go to UPS distribution center to pick it up
Finally I got them to just leave the package in the first place, but it took awhile.
Nobody steals packages off the porch, because I don't live in a shithole.