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Comment by city41 | Hacker News Reader

My house got broken into a few years ago, they took everything I owned except furniture and one tv. I later found my anime collection for sale at a local used dvd store (complete with my name written inside the cases of all the DVDs). I talked with the owner, he had photocopied the guy's drivers license who came in with them. Despite this, and my continually pinging the police, nothing ever happened. He got away with it scott free. I guess you need to be a multi billion dollar corporation to get justice in this country.

EDIT: And just want to add, lesson learned. I didn't have renter's insurance at the time, dumb mistake. I'm now always fully insured, and so should you be :)

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The treatment of your case was underkill.

I think it's more that you need to get a lot of publicity to get justice in this country.

edit: scratch that, publicity only works because it has the potential to bring more powerful groups to your aid.

What happened to the DVDs?

The police confiscated them as evidence. I'm sure they ultimately just threw them away. Towards the end when I started to accept they were never going to pursue the case, I started to ask if I could at least get the DVDs back. No dice.

I think you should have sought remedy in the civil courts. For $20 (or whatever), you probably could have at least gotten a default judgment against the guy and sold the case to a collection agency.

I never got the information on the guy. The store owner refused to give it to me. Basically once I and the store owner realized what happened, the owner called the cops and worked with them directly. They took the DVDs (and presumably a copy of the driver's license). I asked the store owner several times if I could get the driver's license as well, and he refused. And I can't blame him. Given the situation, I'd have done the same thing.

It does feel like in cases like this the cops rely on people having insurance and thus generally don't bother unless the break ins become an epidemic.

It's possible I could have approached the cops differently and received better success. Be more persistent? Be less persistent? Have a lawyer speak with them? I have no idea. When the cops refuse to do their job for whatever reason, there's no fool proof way of reversing that.

EDIT: And also, I probably should have been there when the cops came to the store. That might have also helped. Live and learn. At the time I thought "photocopy of the driver's license! score! I'm saved!" and was pretty naive about the whole thing.

I probably would have spoken to a lawyer about this. If it was going to cost me thousands of dollars, then I would have forgotten about it. If it was a couple hundred bucks, I would pursue the issue out of principle, even if the DVDs were not worth that much.

Perhaps the driver's license was fake. Either way, it's a shame we have to live with people who do these kinds of things. After having my car broken into multiple times and eventually stolen, and home broken into (luckily I don't have much worth stealing), it sickens me.

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