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Comment by salawat | Hacker News Reader

That's an artifact of people no longer reporting theft for inefficacy.

Why should one go through the trouble of filing police reports if they aren't/can't do anything about it?

Ironically this makes your dip in crime statistics as cooked up a narrative with rhetorical purposes as what you just suggested.

Always take data with a grain of salt, and avoid mixing up the map with the territory.

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This is moving the goalposts vs. the GP. He claimed it was the DAs not prosecuting that was the problem. Now the police are in on it too and not even arresting suspects?

Incidentally, the Walgreens shoplifter was arrested and is facing 16 charges: https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/22/us/shoplifting-san-francisco-...

Why would the police arrest a suspect if they already know the suspect won't be prosecuted That's what's really happening here.

It’s not a matter of being “in on it”, it’s just the reality of a) how policing works and b) California’s decriminalized crime laws.

Arresting a person takes an officer off the streets for several hours, which is a waste of scarce resources if the department knows for a fact that there will be no prosecution and the arrested person will be back on the street with no consequences.

Also, any theft under $950 is a mere misdemeanor - it’s a ticketable offense, with no arrest allowed.

I'm not in California, but over here, the cops call the DA first to see if they will accept charges before making an arrest. In which case, it would not make sense to say crime is going down based solely on arrest statistics. Arrests and crime are not the same thing. What these statistics could really be indicating, since arrests are down but crime is up, is that accountability for crime is down.

Police don't do anything about it in other states. It's not due to this law. Police steal more than the people they're supposed to catch.

When police serve a search warrant for career criminals (e.g. drug dealing, car theft, basically any criminal activity that you can make a decent regular income on) it's SOP to cross-reference serial numbers on expensive stuff that's lying around (power tools, electronics, etc) with the list of serial numbers in their DB of police reports so they can tack on a charge if they get a match. It is absolutely a liability to have a bunch of stolen stuff lying around.

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