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Comment by ant_li0n | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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