Hacker News Reader

> I’d love to have a public platform where victims of crimes could force corporations to playall and publish the facts of these cases and crowdsource the identity of the criminals. Any advice?

Well, it's not exactly crowdsourcing, but the “private injured parties force corporations (or anyone else) to play ball and provide factual evidence related to the identity of wrongdoers” facility exists, and is called “the civil courts”.

File a John Doe lawsuit. Identify the entity in possession of evidence useful for identifying the actual perpetrator and issue a subpoena to that party for the evidence. (You might recognize this from how media companies go after copyright pirates with IP information, but the same can be done for other civil offenses, too.)

You can also publish, in any medium, a request for people to voluntarily provide information for the crowdsourcing part; I'm not sure a special platform helps since you then depend on the informants not only being willing to provide info but being reachable via a dedicated purpose-specific platform, and who is going to do that in advance?

Well I did serve Footlocker notice under Florida Civil Statute to preserve the video and confirmed with the store manager the video exists and the events occurred at that store location.

Before I spend a few hundred dollars more on filing a civil suit just to serve discovery on footlocker, I’d go straight to the store and pay the manager to make me a copy (save myself time and money). Either way filing a civil suit or paying of a store manager is not efficient and it’s costly.

At the end of the day you are telling a criminal victim the answer is in the civil courts...which is wrong. I understand police resources, but I did the investigation for them, someone from their department just needs to send an informal email requesting the video, but they won’t. That is a problem. Say I get the video and even identify the individuals, I can give that to the police too but they don’t have to do anything with it. What then, amend the civil complaint from John Doe to said persons and get a default judgment I’ll never collect on? Rather each have a record for felony grand theft and credit card fraud and get my restitution judgment right from the criminal court.

> Before I spend a few hundred dollars more on filing a civil suit just to serve discovery on footlocker, I’d go straight to the store and pay the manager to make me a copy (save myself time and money).

The manager may be prohibited by policy from taking money for that purpose, and it's not exactly going to remain a secret, so the cost may not be a savings if the manager sets the bribe at a level sufficient to adequste cover his risk.

But, sure, you can do that.

> Say I get the video and even identify the individuals, I can give that to the police too but they don’t have to do anything with it.

Correct.

> What then, amend the civil complaint from John Doe to said persons

Yes, that's rather the point of a John Doe suit.

> and get a default judgment I’ll never collect on?

Well, if you assume the defendants both won't show up and are completely judgement proof, sure, those are both potential outcomes.

> Rather each have a record for felony grand theft and credit card fraud and get my restitution judgment right from the criminal court.

Sure, we'd all prefer a public subsidy of litigation costs, but public law enforcement doesn't have infinite resources, so not every loss, even where a crime is involved, is going to have public resources expended on it.

And you still have the same issues collecting on a restitution judgment as any other judgement, and a criminal conviction and potential incarceration of the defendant isn't going to make it more likely you'll ever be able to collect anything from them.

>Sure, we'd all prefer a public subsidy of litigation costs, but public law enforcement doesn't have infinite resources, so not every loss, even where a crime is involved, is going to have public resources expended on it.

What in the hell are you talking about? Your big takeaway from this conversation is what I would like and other who were victims of crimes where in this thread is that what we want is Subsidize our litigation costs?

Im the victim of a crime, the majority of criminal courts have power to order restitution for a reason...it’s not to subsidize litigation, it’s efficiency of the courts and it actually is a savings for tax payer money. Why pay for a civil and criminal case instead of 1 where things may be resolved globally?

Yes, resources are limited not every crime will be solved. That’s a great political response, it kindly ignores the specific facts of this case, where there is video evidence of grand theft and credit card fraud, but the police won’t muster the energy to write an email to request it. If we don’t have have the resources to email a request for a video (which I believe they do), then a public platform to conduct crowdsourced investigations by the public is more warranted than even I originally believed.

As one lawyer o another, I hope your not the victim of a felony some day and the response from fellow man (or lawyer) isn’t...police don’t have resources to investigate your case, stop trying to subsidize your civil litigation costs, that’s what suing John Doe is for.

> Yes, resources are limited not every crime will be solved

Arrest, pretrial detention or supervision, prosecution, and execution of sentence also cost resources. The resource limitation that leads to choices about which crimes to pursue with public resources isn't just (or even mainly) about solving crimes, which is often a miniscule portion of the cost.

> I hope your not the victim of a felony some day and the response from fellow man (or lawyer) isn’t...police don’t have resources to investigate your case,

I have been, twice, once with overwhelming evidence and once where the perpetrator openly admitted the offense, where the police wouldn't even send someone out, much less pursue the case.

I agree it sucks when it happens. That doesn't mean I can't understsnd why it has to happen with the combination of the array of criminal conduct defined and the resources devoted to law enforcement, and the actual structure of the legal system.

>I have been, twice, once with overwhelming evidence and once where the perpetrator openly admitted the offense, where the police wouldn't even send someone out, much less pursue the case.

Now I see why you’re so bitter. Still others shouldn’t have to face the same fate as you. Did you take your own advice and file a civil suit? If not why, is that a shitty solution also? You didn’t care about the damages so much as being the victim of a crime?

For someone talking about the structure of the legal system though...you have great talking points (that’s not police job; they don’t get paid to solve crimes; that’s your loss not society’s problem, you want to subsidize civil litigation costs). And just like a politician you gloss over everyone else’s point and maintain it’s not for the criminal court...but why then, do criminal courts have power to order restitution? Should the criminal court say sorry...that’s not the legal structure now go see a civil lawyer? Seems to me it’s built into the system for criminal courts to order restitution (which they exercise in every plea I’ve ever seen) and it’s cheaper for the taxpayer to have global resolutions in criminal court (of course that’s well known though) rather than having tax payers pay for both a criminal and civil case.

> Now I see why you’re so bitter.

I'm not the one that is expressing bitterness about this reality.

> Still others shouldn’t have to face the same fate as you.

Sure, in a perfect world there would be no resource constraints. Of course, property crime (and even property itself) probably would be a lot less of an issue in that case.

Scarce resources require tradeoffs. Some property crimes not being pursued is not any where close to the biggest issue to address with that.

> Did you take your own advice and file a civil suit?

No, in both cases the damages were insured with a deductible which made it not worth pursuing that even if it might otherwise have been worthwhile (and in neither case did the insurance company seem interested in litigation, either.)

> they don’t get paid to solve crimes;

I never said that. I said that solving crimes is often a negligible portion of the resource cost of pursuing them, so that the fact that a crime is easy to solve doesn't automatically make it worth pursuing.

> And just like a politician you gloss over everyone else’s point and maintain it’s not for the criminal court

I didn't say that, either.

> but why then, do criminal courts have power to order restitution?

Because, where criminal prosecution already serves the public interest, so does integrating restitution, since the courts are a public resource and economy of justice increases the capacity for any given cost of that resource. That doesn't mean it serves the public interest to prosecute every apparent crime, even when there is a near zero cost to solve the crime.

> rather than having tax payers pay for both a criminal and civil case.

Sure. That clearly is true where otherwise there would be both types of cases. But when the criminal case wouldn't otherwise be worth expending resources on, there is no savings to the public by pursuing criminal process for private restitution.

>I'm not the one that is expressing bitterness about this reality.

Proposing a solution (a crowdsourced public platform for investigating crimes for/with law enforcement) is not bitter. Your response of shitting on the idea and saying civil courts already exist...is seemly bitter about your own experience.

I noticed you didn’t answer my question about your own cases, which makes me think you didn’t follow your own legal advice and pursue anything in civil court. That’s very telling.

>Because, where criminal prosecution already serves the public interest

This is where you begin to sound like a troll...I know you’re not for the record...but what you are doing in this thread is telling victims of crimes, that persecuting these cases doesn’t serve the public interest. Who are you to make that determination?

It would appear you are using a self fulfilling definition...that is if your case isn’t prosecuted then there either aren’t resources or it’s not in the public interest. But that’s not true. First you don’t know what happened factually so you have no idea if it’s in the public interest, and second you have no idea whether there are resources for this crime in this jurisdiction.

And you keep bringing up restitution...that’s the least of my concerns. Can you even set forth a standard for what cases are in the public interest? And can you distinguish why my case isn’t in the public interest? Why weren’t your cases in the public interest?

So this is just anecdotal, but here's my 'running and car broken into story': I parked next to a busy dog park and went for my run. Came back to broken window. There was a lady there who took pictures of the perpetrators and their license plate. I filed a report with the police. Guess what the police did. That's right! Absolutely nothing. Not even swing by the people's house and ask for my shit back (I was cool with paying for the broken window, even).

The idea that this kind of surveillance will be used for your benefit is simply wrong, in my opinion. It's a weapon. How does that NWA song go? The one about the police?

The police serve the state, whose interests may or may not coincide with the individual citizen; they don't exist to make you whole when you've lost something to wrongful acts, though they may sometimes help with that incidentally; that's primarily the role of the civil courts and private litigation.

I call bullshit. This is simply a case of the police not doing their job. I filed a police report. Gave them all the necessary information they need to do their f'ing job. And it wasn't like I was talking to a homicide cop, trying to get them to investigate my car burglary. I literally spoke to the detective in charge of this sort of thing.

How am I supposed to find out the people who I should take to court? I do not have access to the license plate database. I suppose I could take the city to court for... something... but we know how far that will go. That's all a moot point, though. My stuff was pawned/traded/fenced/whatever a few days after it was stolen, max. It's not like I can go through a long litigious process to retrieve the ~$500 in stuff that was taken from me.

Then why am I paying their salaries?

> Then why am I paying their salaries?

You, individually, are not.

Your shared interests with those with whom you are are collectively doing so are, obviously, not coextensive with all of your personal interests, but are a subset of them. Law enforcement serves (ideally) diffuse public interests, acute private interests are served (in the legal realm) by private civil litigation.

Particularly, you (individually, and society collectively) are not paying enough to have adequste police resources to treat every property crime as worthy of any follow-up beyond taking a report after dealing with every other higher priority as determined by the people elected and given the responsibility for setting police priorities; the fact that a crime affects you doesn't make it a higher public priority than if it affected someone else, even if it does make it a higher personal priority for you.

If you don't like the current law enforcement priorities or the resources available at particular priority levels, you can vote for different leaders or (in states that provide citizen initiatives) for different laws setting enforcement priorities directly, or for more resources for police to work farther down the list of priorities.

Or—or just in the meantime—you can avail yourself of the system set up for dealing with private harms that is largely independent of public enforcement priorities.

I'll be sure to remember this noble policesplaining explanation the next time a bond issue or tax bill comes up. Paying for the private administration of justice is not how things are supposed to work in this country.

> Paying for the private administration of justice is not how things are supposed to work in this country.

It may not be how you suppose things should work, but the split between the public system serving public priorities and the civil system redressing individual harms is exactly how things have always been supposed to work, both in this country and in the system on which it's legal system was directly modeled.

Yes, law enforcement advocates often blur this when seeking funding or new powers, claiming they work for victims. Thid has never been the case, which is why criminal prosecutions are “the State vs. defendant” whereas private litigation is “plaintiff vs. defendant”. Public prosecutors and law enforcement represent the State, they aren't publicly subsidized to represent the harmed individual the way, say, a public defender is for the accused.

Had a similar event, only involving a hit and run where eyewitnesses had written down a plate and description of the car.

After a few weeks of getting nothing from the police, we asked to speak to a cop known for how no nonsense and rigid she is. Later that day she informed us it was a county vehicle driven by a county employee that was responsible.

> I’d love to have a public platform where victims of crimes could force corporations to playall and publish the facts of these cases and crowdsource the identity of the criminals. Any advice?

I believe you're thinking of the "discovery" phase of a lawsuit.

It sucks that criminals get away with this crap all the time and I am sorry that happened to you but do you really think releasing videos of alleged criminals to the public is a good idea?

https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-falsely-accuses-sunil...

Well “alleged” is the right term but obviously there is a difference between crowdsourcing video in an attempt to find the individual(s) who placed the bombs at the Boston marathon and footlockers cctv video of two men attempting to make purchases using my credit card/debit card.

Never mind the story you linked, because I don’t think it is directly applicable to these facts, but what makes releasing such video of men using my stolen credit/debit cards a bad idea?

The cops don’t care because it’s a lot of work with little or no outcome.

I had a guy steal deliveries over a period of months and was able to get the video on the TV news. The cops were awesome — they caught him and plead it to petty larceny with a $150 fine. I probably spent more money on vacation time to talk to the cops, parole officer, DA, etc.