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Comment by LeonidasXIV | Hacker News Reader

It truly is, theft in general. I moved to Denmark expecting it to be as safe as Germany only to have my backpack stolen while I was eating. Of course the police can't do anything about it, because why would they, they're busy raiding Christiania. At work 2 of my colleagues had their bikes stolen and mine looks deliberately beat up so it doesn't attract attention.

Oh yes, refugees. Never had a single problem with them. A nice Syrian restaurant would actually be on my wishlist.

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> Of course the police can't do anything about it

tbh what could they do about it ? They can't really go full NCIS over a stolen backpack. There are thousands of "minor" thefts, and other small crimes/offences, every day in big cities, they'd need thousands of people to review videos, look for potential witnesses, follow the trail, &c.

Nobody steals just one backpack.

By prosecuting one person, you could prevent thousands of future stolen bags.

The broken windows theory. Cleaned up New York in the late 80s/90s.

That isn’t the broken windows theory. They are saying that people that steal a backpack are likely people that often steal backpacks, so arresting and prosecuting them helps to prevent their individual future crimes. The broken window theory is that visible signs of petty/minor crime and disorder encourage other people to commit additional (and more serious crime) that they would not have committed.

So the broken windows theory would say that seeing graffiti and panhandling would signal to other people that the area had a more general sense of lawlessness, that criminality was more normalized, and that if they commits crimes they would likely not be punished. However, the broken windows theory has been pretty soundly debunked and leads to tons of discriminatory targeting. [1][2]

[1] https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-break-the-broken...

[2] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-problem-with-...

And what about crims who graduate from backpacks to darker misdeeds. Prosecuting the backpack thief cuts a whole chain of potential criminal acts.

Nobody is arguing that we don't want to catch those people, what people are saying is that it's impractical to catch them. Unless you've got a cop on the corner who catches him in the act, by the time the guy gets around the corner he's in the clear, and short of a surveillance state with face recognition cameras and heavy regulation on re-selling electronics, there's not much that can be done.

True, but it all ends up in resources, budgets and priorities.

It's a regular project management problem, there are N police officers and NxM crimes to solve (0<M<∞) at a different cost now prioritize their work.

Invest more in petty crime might have more gain in the future but might lead to more serious crimes in the short term (or not)

The problem, at least in the US, is what we consider a "serious crime". I don't care about people smoking pot, growing pot, or selling pot. I don't particularly care about people speeding on the highway. I do care a lot about murder, rape, fraud, and theft. These crimes have a massive deleterious impact on social stability and quality of life in my community and have direct (sometimes deadly) consequences for the victims.

There is a lot of crime of opportunity. Some people really do just steal one thing for fun because they can.

spot the umberella theft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLJ4MojENJg

If backpack thieves were going to jail decently often, it changes the risk assessment of opportunistic thieves.

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