Police should have arrested this man.
As I commented on the Twitter thread, we used to have tons of break-ins in our area. Miraculously, when they closed down all the pawn shops in the area with a "relaxed" attitude to the provenance of where stuff came from, we saw almost an order of magnitude reduction in b-and-e and theft from vehicle type events.
For this type of crime, you can have about as much of it as you're willing to tolerate. And closing down the operations that make it profitable to steal stuff is way simpler than chasing around perps as it's much more centralized.
I have little doubt that one or more police officers are well aware of the nature of the shop and get their own cut of the profits.
I'd agree they're aware (and don't do anything for whatever reason) but I disagree your run of mill LEO is getting a cut of profits. If anyone is getting a cut, it's not your regular officers. It's whatever title you want to appoint to the person running the police force.
1. The police don't know and don't care. No surprise there.
2. The police do know (holy shit!) and also are directly involved in a criminal operation (holy double shit!).
I don't think it's necessary to posit a 'dark movie thriller' thing where cops are on the take - from a freakin' e-bike chop shop ffs. Both Occam's Razor and Hanlon's Razor suggest that the effort involved here is a combination of laziness, unfamiliarity and institutional disincentives.
That said, a higher level commander may be judged by area crime stats and frankly those guys have rocks in their heads if they aren't cleaning up the fences. A lot of jurisdictions have pretty strict laws about this sort of place being meant to know where their stock is from. If you've got the will to deal with this stuff, you roll in every few days, ask the same questions and shut the doors when the staff don't have good answers.
So, not so long back in the US, there was a car bombing (RV trailer I believe) in... Nashville I think?
Was a pretty big explosion.
Partner of the person who made and detonated said bomb went to the police some days (weeks?) back and literally tried to tell them "my partner made a bomb and is about to go detonate it at this place"
The police, IIRC, brushed it off as a woman being crazy.
The police have a history of not arresting or investigating people/things they should be.
But they don't, haven't, and won't. At this point, you just have to sit back and laugh at how horribly they botch shit on a regular basis, otherwise you'll probably get quite depressed at the reality.