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Comment by white-flame | Hacker News Reader

This is selective enforcement, not equality under the law.

I understand the load police tend to be under, but I really wish they would have some lottery enforcement style that grabbed one random instance of "common" crime like this at a time, and went whole-hog with it. They do it for speeding, so they can make a bit of money with fines, and have the hope of finding connected crimes; what's different about theft like this that they can't do the same?

But back to the all-seeing eyes, I'd far, FAR rather have surveillance footage in the hands of individually distributed private entities, than centralized and auto-analyzing anybody for behavioral pre-crime indicators. If your local McDonald's truly is just its own independent operator storing the footage, then IMO it can still be generally considered "lost in the crowd".

It's only when automatically aggregated and its contents cataloged that stuff like this truly becomes dangerous.

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I had my car stolen a while ago in San Diego county. I was very low on fuel so I knew whoever did it would have had to fill up soon after the theft.

Fast forward two weeks and my car was found. When I got it back, a credit card receipt for fuel at a nearby gas station was sitting in a tray in the center console. The date and time were the same night as the theft, after I had parked for the night. I first rang the station to explain and they confirmed they had CCTV and would hold it for the police, then I rang the detective assigned to handle vehicle thefts locally. He seemed interested and said he'd send a uniformed police officer over to follow up.

While waiting, I checked the trunk and found some trash neatly tied up in plastic bags with more receipts. The officer showed up and could not have been more openly hostile and bored with the whole thing. Big sighs, complaining that he was wasting his time while he dusted for fingerprints and collected the receipts. I waited a few more days and rang the gas station to see if the police had followed up - nope.

Years later I was on a jury for a car thief and I was really impressed by the professionalism of the police in tracking down the thief, and the extra efforts they made. They were all over the CCTV footage and tracking the usage of a particular store's membership card that the victim had left in the car. Same county, different police department though.

I guess the point is that the tools are there for law enforcement when they need them. But there is still no technical solution for when someone is a lazy fuck and can't be bothered to do their job.

No one's career gets made by catching a car thief. Perhaps by busting a car theft operation but no one is going to get promoted for one car thief.

I would suspect that the hostility you felt from the officer was because you got your car back and no one was injured so there was no glory to be had in arresting the thief.

Yup. Metric-driven results. The police, in my area, get rewarded for making arrests--not taking their time to find the actual culprit.

So the two concerns overlap, sometimes.

A few weeks after my car was stolen, another car appeared around the corner and looked to be abandoned (newer car, window left rolled down overnight for a few days) and I mentioned this to my mom. She's very community-minded and went and looked in the abandoned car. She found a letter inside the glove box with a name and looked the person up in the phone book. Nice old lady who confirmed it was her car and it had been stolen.

We learned from this lady that our neighbor's meth head twentysomething son had a girlfriend who lived in the same neighborhood as she did - where my stolen car was abandoned. A lazy cop would call that one hell of a coincidence. A motivated cop would have made the effort and rid the neighborhood of a pest who had graduated from petty crime to multiple felonies.

Just one example and honestly, what are the odds of all those pieces coming together, but it does show that selective enforcement isn't impressing anyone.

It's really the automatic aggregation and query-able database that is an issue, not the data itself. Like, it doesn't really matter if I'm seen walking into an adult store. It does matter if someone can look up the names, addresses, and employers of everyone who walked into an adult store. Or if someone could make a list of everywhere I've been photographed going in the last year and construct narratives based off of that.

Getting that sort of information about people and places needs to be expensive in order to protect people from casual violation of their privacy.

Would you consider the idea that if someone has murdered, they are more likely to murder again (compared to those who never have) an example of "pre-crime"?

No.

You're getting a rare down vote from me because this is such an obvious straw man. At least pretend to try to understand his point.

Can you explain? I agree with the parent poster. I was curious what he considered pre-crime.

My original question was an honest one (as is this one). Yeah, maybe the question was ignorant or stupid... my bad, I suppose. I don't understand why I'd need to pretend to understand anything... that seems dishonest.

I do not understand why an honest question deserves your downvote.

I didn't down vote you, but I did ignore your original comment because it was hyperbolic (bringing up murder and pre-crime). It didn't have any direct bearing (or seem to) to its parent post or the article. If you (and you seem to be) are just genuinely curious about their opinion on pre-crime that's fair, but it didn't seem related, it really did feel like a hyperbolic non-sequitur.

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