"Deputies said that they found 18 other Amazon packages inside his vehicle. They delivered the rest of the packages."
That was really awesome of them to do, especially around Christmas!
That was really awesome of them to do, especially around Christmas!
YPDMV
In the dystopian near-future, Amazon will start offering police departments these kinds of bait packages so they can reduce package theft...
... I guess we already have those for corporations, so extending it to individuals can't be much worse. But there's currently little meaningful competition to shake out what small-scale policies are better (e.g., the question of how much your police should care about package theft probably has basically the same answer throughout all of American suburbia) and it'd be interesting to see if people make the markets work efficiently (and leave ghost towns in the wake of bad decisions).
Not saying that's what happened -- lots of people might be pissed about the package-theft epidemic -- but it certainly could.
It certainly was nothing like just "fuzzy phone video". He had 360 degree video with fine detail clearly showing the thieves' faces up close, vehicles, and so on. His bait package also had GPS and several of the thieves took the packages home to open them. You can't have more condemning evidence. But this all begs the question. I expect that those thieves were indeed arrested, unlike the ones he caught on his home surveillance system stealing packages where indeed it was just some video snippets of the thieves taken from cameras several meters away.
Even if this was a normal shipment being stolen, you have to weigh all the costs in time, effort and tax-payer dollars being spent to arrest a suspect and prosecute. When most shipments are either insured and/or replaced for free, it's not worth police time on these petty crimes.
Beyond that the video also shows a second reason why these crimes need to be actively prosecuted. The creator and his friend trialed their trap packages for what couldn't have been all that long. Yet in that time period they caught around a half dozen thieves, probably around a dozen once you include accomplices. When crimes aren't prosecuted and you have the sort of people that would take advantage of this, you're incentivizing crime.
A third issue is that without enforcement you start to encourage vigilante justice, which can be disproportionate and extremely dangerous. In this case the retribution was good spirited and presumably aimed at embarrassing the police into action and getting some social media love. But you could just as well have somebody who created dangerous packages, or an armed individual seeking to engage in confrontation with the thieves.
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And as an aside, with criminal theft it doesn't matter if the item is returned after stolen. A big difference between criminal offenses (including misdemeanors) and civil offenses is that the latter is generally about making material loss right again. The former seeks to right the material loss, but the punishment also includes purely punitive measures. Break a contract to the tune of $100 and you're generally on the line for $100 and some court costs. Steal the same amount and you're facing e.g. 6 months in jail and a $1000 fine.
The free part of insurement or replacing is a lie. If there is a 10% chance that your packega will be stolen/lost/break/whatever, then the shipping company ill add a secret 10% more to the price. You are paying for it. It's just that instead of an explicit extra charge that you can't opt out, this is marketed as a free feature.
How many stories out there have you read about this happening to people - small town, passing through, and they rape you on made up bs because it's hard for you to come back and go to court. How about all those small towns in the news where they steal all the cash out of your car?
Small town cops are not bad people - to the small town in which they live. Saying they are not bad people in general is opposite of the truth. It's like saying the nazis were great people because they were good to other nazis.
All of this bullshit is just a moneygrab.