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Comment by zed88 | Hacker News Reader

Well...a bit off topic but kind of relevant.

My car got broken into and my iPad nicked. I was able to locate that, however, the cops here in NZ were really unhelpful.

They said the GPS location wouldn't be sufficient for a search warrant as they have had many cases of false positives.

I said I would give the ssid and ip address of their wifi network, even then they wouldn't agree for a raid.

It was only when the thief (who was a minor) took the pic of his family member, which I then furnished to the police (via iCloud), they could do something.

Wondering what good is technology, if the law takes a while to catchup, well at least here in NZ.

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It's not just NZ. Police in the US are no better. In the Dallas PD, the detective assigned to the case when our house was burgled would not respond to emails sent to him providing evidence. After reaching out through other avenues to reach the detective, he flat out responded with being too busy to read emails. The case went uncleared. However, a few weeks later, there was a random call saying they found an iPad reported as lost/stolen and would be willing to return it for a small finder's fee. Again, the police refused to assist during the meet up.

I've noticed in my lifetime that a number of crimes have become ad-hoc decriminalized.

Smaller crimes like bicycle theft or small electronics are basically "who cares" to the police. Many police departments don't even do bicycle registrations anymore.

Even car theft has sort of fallen to insurance companies to take care of. A lot of people just want a police report to turn in to insurance so they can get a new car.

I don't know about serious crimes. Are people more often caught with lots of data and the erosion of privacy?

I'm sure they prefer to focus on bigger cases - why go with a single bike theft if they can investigate an organized bike theft and laundering organization? Why bother with a single phone theft if they find a warehouse full of stolen merchandise?

But yeah, that does mean a lot of petty crime goes unpunished. Stealing a bike here has become normalized - as in, "my bike got stolen, I need to get home so I'll just steal another". Mind you that's only possible with shoddy locks.

> Why bother with a single phone theft if they find a warehouse full of stolen merchandise?

Because many more people are affected by minor crime than major crime. In the UK, where the police's funding has been reduced significantly, it's next to impossible to get them to do anything for burglary and minor thefts (although they're quite reactive if you say something impolitic on Twitter).

> why go with a single bike theft

because of

> Stealing a bike here has become normalized - as in, "my bike got stolen, I need to get home so I'll just steal another"

There's three options:

1. We abolish ownership

2. Everyone is responsible for protecting his own stuff, resorting to vigilante justice if he finds the thief after the fact

3. The taxes we pay fund police and courts to bring justice.

Option 1 is a version of socialism, option 2 is anarchy, that only leaves us option 3 if we want capitalism.

There are capitalistic (albeit not thorough) versions of 1 - rentals [0] and services (Uber/etc)

[0] https://www.divvybikes.com/

On Rentals I would disagree. Most rentals today depend on 3: to reclaim the money from the original purchase they force every user to pay, using police and court system as the means to enforce that payment and to prevent theft. Maybe in an anarchy rentals would also be quite successful by centralizing the problem of keeping property safe.

Services like Uber are interesting because they essentially strive to eleminate ownership by eleminating the thing to be owned.

>There's three options:

All your options assume a perfectly rational world. The world we have now is not one of those 3 options, but it exists. Things are often internally contradictory.

When I get frustrated with the police, it helps to remember that they make like $25/hr or less. In a wealthy suburb I just moved into a few months ago, I learned that a majority of the children of the police are growing up below the poverty line.

The local politicians are apparently very liberal about their views on police (do not support), so they keep the pay as low as possible. All the police have to live outside the community and commute to work the area since it is unaffordable for them to live here.

I’m actually surprised they serve as well as they do under the circumstances.

I don't know where you live, but in Seattle even brand new recruits (who aren't even actually working yet) make more than that

https://www.seattle.gov/police/police-jobs/salary-and-benefi...

Funnily in the UK I got Oxford police to enter a house based on GPS and ssid and me remotely setting a loud alert on the phone. The robber sadly smashed it though while being apprehended.

I can definitely see the point regarding GPS location, I remember an article about people living at some default coordinates suffering from something like daily or weekly police raids.

Indeed, due to MaxMind's GeoIP location for the middle of the US (when it can't find a more accurate US location) at 38°N 97°W. So unfortunate.

https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-turn...

Legally could you go get it, and in the resulting skirmish perhaps attract the attention of the police?

Is trespassing to retrieve stolen property still trespassing?

I am not sure about the local bylaws around trespassing, but the lady on the police helpline categorically asked me to not do it.

It was being pinged in a gang prone area, I wouldn't have done it anyway.

Could you hire a asset recovery agent to actually do the "retrieving" for you?

This reminds me of a (probably apocryphal) story a South African friend of mine told me once about the state of policing down there in the late nineties / early noughties.

The story goes that a man wakes up in the middle of the night to the sound of burglars looting his garage. Given the occurences of aggravated robberies in SA at the time, often involving guns, he didn't want to confront the miscreants himself, and so called his local police department.

Apparently since no actual violence had been done at this point, the police-person to whom he was speaking claimed that they had no free units to come and attend, and that they'd send a car round in the morning to collect evidence. At this point the call ended.

The man who was being burgled was understandably unimpressed with this, thought about what he could do, and then rang the police back.

"Don't worry about the burglars here. I shot them." he says.

Within minutes his house is surrounded by police cars, and the burglars are under arrest.

The commander of the responding officers says to the man "I thought you said you shot them?"

The man replies "I thought you said you had no units free?"

With the gist of the story being that "no units free" actually meaning "no units free to prioritize a burglary", or what?

An active shooting incident would certainly reshuffle the prio list...

Ask O.J. Simpson.

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