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Comment by blacksmith_tb | Hacker News Reader

Isn't that just a cost/benefit calculation? How many projects have you worked on where someone suggested spending X hours on something only to have it shot down for minimal ROI? Obviously it matters more to you personally, and you'd like to have a sense that "justice is done" but really it's just an insurance claim. Of course it's also frustrating if the thief has only gotten some random junk out of your car - if it wouldn't lead to endless extortion I personally would be happy to hand him or her $10 to not break my window, even if there's no deductible, just to spare me dealing with it.

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Unlike company, law is equal to everyone.

I respect the law, and the lawmakers should work for me. The ROI calculations are to be budgeted and accounted for, otherwise why am I being taxed?

Laws and budgets are set on different time-scales; there is never 100% alignment between the cost of enforcing the law and the availability of the budget required.

In fact, most of the time, there's very little alignment, because there's no incentive to have those things be aligned. Sometimes even disincentive: there are laws on the books nobody wants enforced, and a culture in policing of enforcing the letter of the law, not the spirit—but one can always choose to not enforce a law one doesn't agree with by just making an informal agreement that certain crimes (of basically equal severity) take enforcement priority, such that those crimes nobody sees as crimes just get "de-prioritized" to the point that they're never enforced at all.

>law is equal to everyone

I understand the goal of this sentiment, but this is not how most societies work. Equality under the law is the proper ideal, but it's not at all how things work. There are a lot of reasons for that, from bias to lack of resources. But whatever the particular reason may be, most people only notice and complain about inequality when they are its losing side.

Make no mistake about it though, from the police at the bottom of the stack, all the way up to how the judges rule on cases at the top of the stack, the legal system has never been equitable.

No, the law does not and should not use maximum resources for everyone. It is clearly beneficial to not send whole teams of people looking for weeks for your stolen wallet like they would for a missing person.

>The ROI calculations are to be budgeted and accounted for Often this would require you to pay more in tax than the value you would get back from it. Are you ok paying $1000 to track down the person who smashed your window when you will likely never get any money from them or will you just pay the $100 it costs to get a new window which doesn't happen very often.

Personally, I would vastly prefer cops focused on minor property crimes. That’s not to say the need a statewide manhunt, but something approaching 1:1 of property damage vs police respond quickly adds up to several hours of investigation.

Generally, a tiny fraction of the population commits the vast majority of such crimes. People will do 500$ worth of damage to make 30$, work out what it takes to make useful amounts of money and these people end up destroying a lot of property. So, the ROI calculation needs to account for windows not smashed.

> People will do 500$ worth of damage to make 30$

A good example is copper wire thieves. They pull up to a house and access the electrical panel in the garage which they turn off. Using a winch, they pull out all the copper wire in the house that's directly connected to the box (there's also many branch lines left behind). They then sell the wire as scrap for $20 or so and presumably use the money to buy drugs.

Fixing this damage can run $30,000 to $100,000. The whole house can have to be torn apart from the inside to reinstall all the electrical.

> It is clearly beneficial to not send whole teams of people looking for weeks for your stolen wallet like they would for a missing person.

A massive miscalculation -- stolen wallets, cell phones etc are individually small-ticket items, but the criminals who make a living stealing them do hundreds per month and thousands per year. Taking the perpetrator of a thousand muggings or pickpocketings off the street is a job worth doing, possibly more so than chasing small time drug dealers or runaway teens.

> but the criminals who make a living stealing them do hundreds per month and thousands per year.

You got a source for that claim? At least in the US, it’s significantly higher than any number I’ve ever read in a study / report.

Law may well be the same. However, the question everyone has to answer is not about law per se, but:

"How much justice can you afford?"

San Francisco doesn't want the law applied equally to everyone: that would preserve existing structural injustices. We want the law applied towards equality, cutting down the rich and lifting up the poor.

Punishing an already poor and marginalized person is counterproductive to that goal, so we try to avoid it as much as possible. And that's probably who you're going to find on the other end of a car break in. So why bother looking?

There is an intangible to living in a place where cars are regularly broken into vs. living in a place where they aren't. Think of the kinds of attitudes that people develop towards others in the two places. Trust vs. distrust, comfort vs. unease, open vs. closed. There's also the second-order effects of having a class of people going around committing those kinds of crimes with impunity. Many become emboldened and move on to other malfeasance. Order breeds order and chaos breeds chaos.

> Many become emboldened and move on to other malfeasance. Order breeds order and chaos breeds chaos.

Why does SF have a sizable increase in property crimes over the past 10 years but a drop in violent crimes? I'd imagine if chaos did truly beget chaos, then rates of crime across the board would be going up.

Your words bring to mind my experience with gentrification in a few cities: one person's order is another person's chaos. If you ask a longterm resident in a gentrifying neighborhood how they feel about what the new developments are doing to their social fabric, you might find your simple truism gets wierded <3

It's often that crimes restore lost order and stability for some people. Not saying it's moral on one side or the other, but it certainly doesn't feel like a neat little package.

I know that moral philosophy is a complex matter, but I should hope we can agree that being upset that your car was broken into is significantly different than being upset that there’s a hip coffee shop in your neighborhood.

I think its that not affording rent leads to higher demand for crime.

Living in a place with breakins is fine for people who don't have expensive things lying around.

The thieves don’t leave crappy old cars alone.

So true. Reminded me of Swiss towns in the Alps where houses, bikes in the shopping street and cars in general are unlocked. Really refreshing and makes you feel safe. The bigger risk to a car is when it is locked and the lock mechanism freezes over.

At the far other extreme of the spectrum, in blighted urban neighborhoods, everyone also leaves their cars unlocked. If you let the junkies inspect the contents of your car freely, they won't smash the windows to do it.

San Francisco has about 30,000 car breakins per year, largely because there is no enforcement. How much does that cost?

This is a great boon to the repair shops of San Francisco and I cannot for the life of me think of a parable that would indicate insidious downsides.

For those reading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

How much is the cost of a break-in?

Truly spitballing an answer to this. A car window replacement is probably a few hundred bucks ($200-500), I imagine there are some instances with some really high value (greater than $1k USD, think a laptop) takes but there's also probably a ton of small hauls (loose change, stereo) or unsuccessful takes. I'd guess the average probably couldn't be more than a thousand bucks a break in, on average. This means this back of the napkin math puts car break-ins in that area costing probably not more than $30M, not including some insurance overheads and what not.

So judging by off the napkin math on costs and optimistically assuming stronger enforcement would lead to 50% less car break ins, if strong enforcement costs more than $15 million is it worth it? When does the cost of enforcement become inconsequential to the results? A good question to debate on either side IMO.

Even if a single police officer costs $1M a year all-in (which I'm significantly high-balling, I hope), I imagine 15 police officers hired specifically to work on car break-in cases would make a huge dent. The car thieves keep doing what they're doing because they know the police won't track them down. Even some minor efforts to start tracking them down could act as a powerful deterrent.

That's not really the point, though. It's not just a simple monetary calculation. Even if the true value of repairs and stolen items was $30M, I would allocate several times that of taxpayer money just for the quality of life benefits, assuming it would do some good.

Last car I owned in SF somebody broke a window and rifled through the inside. I didn't fix it, except to tape some plastic over the broken window. Shortly later, somebody broke another window (instead of just ripping off the tape, WTF!). Eventually sold the car and had to replace the windows, costing about $1000.

Similar here. Both back side windows. Fortunately they were on hinges and could be cracked open so I was able to get used ones at a junkyard for $60 each and replace them myself. Then the rear window got smashed in. $200 at the junkyard for that one and a lot harder to DIY. Then the trunk got jimmied, breaking the lock. I can't remember what that costed to fix, I had to have it keyed by the dealer, I think it was fairly expensive. Stolen radio (value approximately $300) I didn't replace. Stolen technical manuals and books (maybe $300 as well) I replaced some. I doubt they were able to even sell those.

It's one of many reasons I moved away from there and do not entertain any job offers from that region, regardless of how much they are offering. At a certain point one needs to write off these cities. That or accept being a victim with no legal recourse knowing your car's going to be vandalized damaged and stolen on a regular basis and you are going to be hassled by guys with guns when walking down the street.

Problem here is, if person #1 can do something, and gets away with it, then person #2 does that, and gets away with it, many more people will do the same.

Spending more on the crimes with negative ROI, makes the total ROI higher because it acts as a deterrent for future would-be criminals.

Reddit was full of video of really trashy kids, driving their bicycles through malls and stores harrassing random people there, and "nobody could do anything" about them. If those kids were arrasted, sent to juvie, given community service (or maybe even just shown on tv crying in court, instead of acting all badass on their bikes), that would sure stop many others from repeating what they did.

There’s many things wrong with the US and police, but a big one is this; The cops shouldn’t be doing cost/benefit analysis; They should be prosecuting every crime they feel they can win (have enough evidence for).

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