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Comment by Hjfrf | Hacker News Reader

Nobody steals just one backpack.

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

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.

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

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.

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-...

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