So the only thing you can achieve by reporting a theft is that someone gets subjected to the US justice system (assuming they do anything at all). It is highly unlikely you get anything back. So you shouldn't do it to recover your goods.
Furthermore, reporting anything to the police has extra consequences:
1) they will investigate, and may find something wrong with you
2) they may report it to other government organizations which may use it in ways you did not anticipate and really don't want (e.g. child services: your house was broken into and is "not livable")
3) just the association, or that the neighborhood sees police officers near/in your house will spread and may have consequences.
There's nothing to gain from using the justice system and everything to lose.
Given that a working justice system is what seperates capitalism from anarchy, how is this allowed to happen in America?
It’s interesting, since in daily life it seems almost normal.
>nothing to gain from using the justice system
Insurance may require the theft to be reported before they cover any claims.
Yes, that's the reason to report.
Another reason not to, if you don't have insurance: creepy cops being creepy at you. Story time:
Walking home with my then-housemate after dinner that involved drinking, we were mugged. Minor violence, lost our wallets.
I called the cops. They wanted to come the next day to do an interview, which I declined, pointing out they weren't going to try to find the wallets, so what's the point? At which point cop starts getting weird, first saying they need their statistics for better funding. I still decline, and he says "Well, we'll send someone anyway" and hangs up.
Sure enough, a cop shows up the next day. I tell him I don't need his services and he starts pressuring me for a report. At this point, I'm pissed and tell him to leave; he makes vague noises about maybe not responding to this block very quickly in the future; I barely manage not to say something really rude that most likely would have escalated things.
My policy now: if I'll probably die anyway, or if it involves enough money that I can't ignore it, I might call the cops. Otherwise I'll take my chances that inviting more shitty people to a shitshow will just turn it worse.
FTP.
If you can reasonable keep control (and that could be a simply having the ability to walk away) then do that instead of calling the police.
Once you call them, you're trusting that they won't turn on you, or take issue with you.
So if they actually manage to do that (obviously people don't generally commit crimes because they're swimming in money), then no, this is wrong information.
Yeah, seems like I was, in the general case of stolen assets, sorry. My example applies to the more limited case of sale of stolen assets to a buyer, where there's enough conspiracy between seller and buyer, and the buyer is an unpleasant career fence. It happens often enough: there's a specialized network of fences (dealers in stolen goods). Given the efforts the parties make to keep their operation covert, conspiracy is easy for the government to allege. And the civil forfeiture against the money used to buy the goods proceeds without a hitch. Yet the fence is not indicted.It happens at scale, you can be sure that false positives (honest citizens who happen to look bad) get burned too.