Police departments could do this as they have done with "bait cars" to catch those who engage in this behavior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_car
Which is to say make better efforts to actually solve property crimes that occur naturally, rather than manufacturing crimes for the purpose of resolving them more easily.
I know of more than one junk car that's been dragged out of a particular swamp (because scrap prices were high) with no attempt made to contact the rightful owner. That would get you a felony charge in my state (I'm sure a good lawyer could beat it but still). I know that that's not the same as stealing a bait car but it's pretty close.
I mean I don't live in a high crime area so maybe I'm missing something, but that doesn't sound like the behavior of an "otherwise honest person".
That is probably the weakest excuse for criminal behaviour I've ever heard. "Someone else was going to steal that car, so it might as well be me"? Bullshit.
If someone's an "honest person" who only engages in crime when they think they can get away with it due to it being unlikely the police will follow up, they never had personal integrity or principles to begin with - they just hadn't been put in a situation where the cost/value proposition of commmiting a crime was worth it.
A better example is when the cops stick an under cover officer on the street corner as a hooker and of course she gets picked up because someone who would never pick up a hooker sees one that doesn't have a million hard miles on her and decides to give it a go.
I know my local police used to leave rolls of copper wire on job sites to bait people to steal them. Of course nobody with a brain would leave an unsecured roll of copper wire around like that so the opportunity for the crime doesn't normally ever exist except when the police are baiting.
Both those examples are baiting people who wouldn't otherwise consider the risk reward to be worth it to engage in crime.
For example, I'm too well paid to shoot you over $10, $100, $1000, $10k, etc. but you keep tacking on zeros and eventually it gets tempting. It's like that but with smaller dollar amounts. People rationalize petty theft all the time by saying things like "well it was there and they weren't using it and I was going to put it (or the money made selling it) to good use". They know it's wrong but they just can't help themselves.
"You wouldn't be fat, if you ate a reasonable amount of healthy foods instead of calorie-rich junk."
"You wouldn't be a criminal, if you had enough moral fiber to obey the law."
I think you are intentionally ignoring a lot of circumstantial factors that have been scrubbed from the strawman hypotheticals.
I believe the canonical example for rating someone on a scale of morality is as follows:
Jack's child is very sick, and may die. The doctor gave him a prescription for a drug that would cure his child in one dose, but when he took it to the pharmacist, he found that they had some in stock, but that single dose cost more than he has ever saved at one time, and even if he could get a loan big enough to buy it, he would never be able to pay off the debt. Jack did notice some holes in the pharmacy's security, though. Should he break in to steal the drug, to save his child? Why?
There are a lot of ways to answer the why, for the question as posed. We are also adding some additional questions. When Jack is caught, how severely should he be punished? Does the reasoning behind the situation change if the police operate the pharmacy as a front, and intentionally inflate the price of life-saving drugs and weaken security, in order to more easily catch people who might rob pharmacies, if allowed the opportunity?
It doesn't matter whether it was a bait roll of copper wire or a real roll that some person neglected to secure properly, the problem is that they had an opportunity to steal, and took it. Intent matters.
The morality encoded into the justice system is not built for the benefit of the people typically getting sent to prisons. Those people may have some ethically defensible justification for having motive to commit crimes. It would not be an arguments the courts would care to entertain, of course. But the argument still remains for all those of us who are not judges. Property laws protect those who already own property, at the expense of those who do not. The enforcement of property law typically tells those who have suffered "petty" property crime to fill out a report and sod off, while those who suffered "grand" property crime get the benefit of police investigation. Ever had a bike stolen? Ever had a car stolen? If the bicycle is one's only means of transportation, and the police refuse to help, so they can investigate the theft of a car from someone that owns two, that person now has a reasonable motive to steal bicycles: society owes them one, and apparently does not consider it a crime worth investigating.
If the law does not equally benefit everyone, those who benefit least are not ethically bound to obey it. If the rules of the game stipulate that a given player cannot ever win, or even advance to second place, that player is justified in not playing the game, or in cheating. In such a situation, would it be better to be vigilant at all times, to stop everyone from cheating (including the winners), or to help the losers to cheat a little, then immediately report their cheating to the other players (eliding over the help that was given), so they can be further penalized? The latter is a dick move, and the former more desirable.
This is why you lock your bicycle to an immovable object during the day, and bring it inside at night. And this is why you secure the spool of copper wire before leaving the jobsite. And this is why you lock your car and don't store Bluetooth-broadcasting valuables in it. It is not necessary to understand why the motive exists, but only to realize that some people will have it, and are not necessarily evil because of it. Deny them the opportunity, and they will not commit that particular crime.
Bait vehicles reduce the crime to merely having the motive.
At what point does it become non-opportunistic to steal something? if you have to cut a rope or chain? if you have to kick in a door to get to it?
>The morality encoded into the justice system is not built for the benefit of the people typically getting sent to prisons.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, do you want a justice system where "stealing something is OK as long as it was easy to do" is a core value?
> The enforcement of property law typically tells those who have suffered "petty" property crime to fill out a report and sod off, while those who suffered "grand" property crime get the benefit of police investigation.
This is just pragmatism. Police departments have limited budgets and the community is better served by putting those resources towards more serious crimes. Monetary value of damages is an easy metric to compare the seriousness of crimes, and to prioritise the allocation of budget towards investigations accordingly.
>that person now has a reasonable motive to steal bicycles: society owes them one, and apparently does not consider it a crime worth investigating.
This is incomprehensible thinking to me. Just because you have been wronged does not give you permission to wrong others. The person who stole the bicycle owes it to the victim (or the replacement value), not society.
>If the law does not equally benefit everyone, those who benefit least are not ethically bound to obey it.
If you don't agree with a law you can campaign to get it changed, or leave the jurisdiction where that law is in effect. You do not get a free pass for breaking the law just because you don't like it.
> It is not necessary to understand why the motive exists, but only to realize that some people will have it, and are not necessarily evil because of it.
Having a motive to steal something is not the same as acting on it and actually stealing the thing. Knowingly harming others is evil, to some degree. Obviously stealing some copper is far less of a crime than committing murder, but both are wrong.
>Deny them the opportunity, and they will not commit that particular crime.
Or they'll just go look for another opportunity. Baiting criminals proactively catches people who would commit crimes regardless.
I understand if criminal justice reform is not one of your political issues. It's easy to ignore what happens in the system if it is not. But I encourage you to look into it. After you do, tell me that it isn't mainly a mass of unfortunates being lined up to be kicked in the head, systematically, with the genuinely bad people--who really do need to be separated from the rest of us--as a minority of the cases.
Crime is down since 1980, yet prison populations are way up. Why is that? Who are the people getting put in the prisons? Who are the people profiting from this trend?
Could you provide more information about how this...is a thing? Where it's reasonably plausible to find the owner? And a felony?
Unless undercover officers actively entice somebody to steal them or something? That would be entrapment it is already not allowed I think.
I’d just rather us not have to debate where the line should be and be ever vigilant as police push the boundaries.
It replaces the pursuit and prosecution of people who have committed crimes in the community with jamming up all the usual suspects.
It's lazy, and it takes resources away from victims waiting for satisfaction. "Sorry, we aren't going to look for the person who robbed you, but we arrested 30 folks who are criminally predisposed to do exactly the same crime against cars similar to yours, if they're parked nearby, with unlocked doors, and pawnable valuables easily detectable inside. One of them might even be the person who robbed you! We're not going to check, of course, but you can maybe pretend that we caught them, to make yourself feel better."
Instead of setting a bait car, and watching just that one while it's out, watch over as many cars as possible to detect and prevent break-ins, all the time--as the community expects its police to do, to earn their pay.
It may be effective in the short term, but it also undermines community trust in the justice system, which is critical for policing to be effective in the long term. If you round up and persecute all the usual suspects at regular intervals, their friends and family will stop helping you, and start shunning you whenever you come 'round to "help".
I'd think people stealing bait cars are often the same people who would be stealing regular cars. So a successful bait car protects one or more regular cars. It is important to solve crimes that happened, but it is even more important to prevent future crimes. In fact, for property crimes, the overwhelming benefit of solving them is preventing future crimes. Except in backward countries with retributive justice system, like US, I suppose. (I want the guy who robbed me to suffer!)
Otherwise we, as a society, would simply get collective insurance to make victims whole and simply ignore property crimes.
Bait cars protect other cars as well, police is advertising their presence often, so everybody knows they are there. That has a chilling effect on crimes of opportunity.
In fact you don't even need to have any bait cars at a given location to reduce crimes, just say you do.
Would you be ok with private citizens, en masse, installing GPS trackers in their belongings, turning _all_ cars into bait cars btw? Would that also be considered entrapment?
Efficient is often lazy, but lazy is not always efficient. If the specific implementation of lazy is doing a different-but-similar job, rather than a different method for getting the same results, that isn't efficiency, it's substitution.
Preventing future crimes is important, but that is not the public mandate for police. Police are there to investigate crimes that occurred, collect the evidence, locate and arrest the suspects, and then turn everything over to the courts for further resolution. Future crime prevention is the responsibility of everyone living in civilization, in part by implementing security infrastructure under the control of those most directly impacted by the crimes in question. People want to feel safe, but not watched. It's not security, if the implementation makes you nervous about how it will be used.
Yes, I would be okay with private citizens, en masse, installing anti-theft devices in their belongings, provided that the tracking is under the control of the device owner. That's not bait, it's just another security measure. If it doesn't have a hook in it, it's just fish food; some worms get eaten, and others do not. You can't save them by taking a dozen fish out of the lake. They save themselves by developing camouflage, or a bitter toxin, or sharp spines, or slippery slime--whatever it takes to ward off the fish. Meanwhile, the anglers continue to use the bait that catches the most fish. They aren't out to protect worms; they just want to catch fish.
Another problem, of course, is that people already do that, with services such as LoJack, Prey, and Find My iPhone. When the owners take the location evidence to police, they do not always do anything with it. Someone can give a cop exact GPS coordinates, including elevation, with video recorded from their laptop with a clear image of the thief's face, and see no action. A television journalist can go to the thief's house, with cameras rolling, get a complete confession, air it on a national news program, and still not recover the property or see an indictment. Cops do not have a legal obligation to do anything for any particular person, as affirmed by several federal circuits independently, and then the Supreme Court. And private citizens and journalists do not produce a clean chain of evidence custody. The cops who don't pursue real property crimes that are trivially easy to resolve are being non-efficiently lazy, by doing an easier job.
As long as the priority is on bait vehicles and drug-related civil forfeitures and parallel constructions and other bastardizations of Peelian policing, the cops are not making the public feel secure in their liberties and possessions. They are not being what we wish them to be, and not doing what we would willingly pay them to do.
And that bait cars are in the same category with civil forfeitures and other things you listed.
We have police exactly so we don't have to grow slimy toxic spines ourselves. Places with weak rule of law can get by with Honor culture for example, but that has a cost.
Anglers might not be out to protect worms, but they can destroy fish populations just fine nevertheless, most lakes need to be stoked in fact.
As for not pursuing real property crimes with digital evidence, that is often a question of not having a process and infrastructure for that and balancing time spent with likelihood of getting enough for convicting. Standards for admissible evidence are there for a reason, and relaxing them would give much more power to police than to private citizens. This is going to be much worse soon, when deepfakes become popular.
Active baiting is different, there police would be introducing the same forces that create criminals in the first place.