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Comment by cbg0 | Hacker News Reader

Are they really breaking into your car just to steal your USB cable or is there other stuff you leave in plain sight?

I'm in San Francisco, so not Seattle, but cars get broken into for the sport of it by this point. A friend's had her window broken and used, gross dog leashes and an old Nokia charger stolen. The lost hours of work to replace the window was the real cost to her dog walking business.

Just park with your windows open if there's nothing they can really take. Repairing the window isn't with the cost or the time.

That might help in San Francisco, but in Seattle, that's lost hours dealing with a soaked interior.

Yeah this isn't for rainy or dusty environments for sure.

It may be getting soaked in SF too, but with different kind of fluids

Thanks for the f-shack

- Dirty Mike & The Boys

Problem in San Francisco is, you'll get people sleeping in your car if you do that.

Depending on the height of your windows I would think sleeping would be the best thing other people could do to your car.

I'd fear the associated smell.

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. I know at least one person who had to get rid of their car after a stinky street person crashed in it. This is a real thing that happens and once an awful stench has permeated cloth and upholstery there is no easy fix.

> * I know at least one person who had to get rid of their car after a stinky street person crashed in it.*

Obligatory reference to the Seinfeld "The Smelly Car" episode (one of the few I've actually seen). [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smelly_Car

Dirty Mike and the boys will have an f-shack in there and it will never be the same

San Diego as well; happened to me Monday. Car didn't lock all the way (older car) and they try every handle.

Thankfully they didn't wreck the car or anything. Just laid the seat back.

As clever as this idea sounds, it's not a good suggestion. I once accidentally left my windows down in SF for 12 hours and my car was essentially stripped clean - headrests, registration, proof of insurance, manual, floor mats - all gone. Additionally all my doors and trunk were wide open.

I guess I've never driven a nice enough car. I used to keep my windows down any time I parked along 8th/Harrison and fwiw nothing ever happened to my car, though there were obvious signs of folks rifling around inside. All my documents were kept in a locked glove compartment and I pretty much had nothing stealable in the car without having the car be cased.

Sounds horrible and for me it is unimaginable. In Croatia, you rarely hear that a car waa broken into even in bigger cities. In smaller towns a lot of people don't even bother to lock their cars.

Why do you think that is?

In countries like Croatia the police is busy catching criminals instead of helping them inject heroin, going after mean people on Twitter, or calculating if the robbed amount is under 900 USD and then apologising to the thief and giving him a ride home like the SF police do.

I think it has more to do with culture than police effectiveness as we are not so popular as a country with good enforcement of law. Croatia is a small country and there is always someone that knows someone even if he is on the other side of the country. So even if somebody steals something from someone, there is a big chance that it is someone you know (he knows when you leave your house, when you get back etc.), so it would be a really big shame if you find out that someone you know stole something from you. Therefore, most thefts are done by Roma people because they are somewhat excluded/isolated from society.

I suspect it might be due to demand/ability to unload hot goods. Or maybe yall got it good in Croatia and no one feels the desire to go rifling through cars?

I suspect Croatia might have better law enforcement and attorneys than SF does (look up Chesa Boudin)

Ah yes, the solution to crime in the country with the highest incarceration rate, is more incarceration!

If you google "Chesa Boudin" and hit question box marked What Did Chesa Boudin Do? It reveals thus

"Then, in November, Boudin did something no San Francisco DA had done before: He charged a police officer with homicide, for the killing of an unarmed Black man in 2017"

so maybe you're going off a little half-cocked

If you think the only logical conclusion of law enforcement is incarceration, then I feel bad for you and your country.

And risk someone shitting in your car? No thanks.

My friend visited a car breakin prone area in canada once, and left his car unlocked like his girlfriend suggested. They broke his window anyway, and stole a minecraft keychain and about $4 in change.

Hilariously he actually got the stuff back eventually

I've never had my car broken into... but most of that was a midwestern city not the coasts, although I've been in San Fran, NYC, and DC.

I have a very messy car. Not rotting food messy, just a lot of clothes and things, often a lot of workout clothes, backup winter clothes, a couple blankets.

Thieves like clean cars. See target, break in, grab, leave. Messy cars are slow, annoying, and induce too much cognitive load.

If I lived in San Fran right now, I would have a shitty car with a lot of clothing in it just for the purposes of covering up things I don't want stolen and being annoying to thieves.

I don't think that would be nearly as big of a deterrent in SF as you'd hope. It seems like nowadays any car that CAN be broken into will be.

Lightning cables are expensive, and Apple is definitely encouraging car theft by not including them in the box anymore.

edit: this was a joke and it got appropriately downvoted. I regret nothing.

A cable that costs $20 - $30 retail NEW doesn't seem worth risking jail time over.

It's like soap, which is much cheaper. Both are easily sold.

You may be underestimating how significant $20-$30 is to some people.

Edit: wording.

Are you suggesting a stolen cable brings the same sort of premium as a new one from Apple?

Regardless, I'm not suggesting this at all. My point is that there are likely ways to get something worth so little without risking significant jail time.

You may be surprised to learn that the economics of small scale theft are pretty weird. https://priceonomics.com/why-thieves-steal-soap/

This is kind of my point. I guess I underestimated the demand for iphone cables.

People break into cars to steal pocket change in the cup holder, so a $5 cable isn't outside the realm of what a thief would grab. Especially if they're already in the car.

There's no risk of jail for theft in Seattle.

https://crosscut.com/2019/10/whats-seattle-doing-solve-its-s...

And people wonder why there is so much crime...

About half blame poverty/insufficient government handouts and excuse the theft.

About half blame not prosecuting crime.

But no one wonders. Everyone "knows".

You don't need government handouts, you need sane policies that stop making CoL so expensive.

It's worth it for someone. I've had people break into my car for 3 quarters and a half ounce of super glue.

Man they're selling stolen $25 bottles of tequila on 3rd Ave. Not even expensive stuff is hot commodity now, especially if you live in a cash world. Most of the stuff the street bazaars sell is straight up junk. A shiny Apple cable is worth it

I genuinely think HN's emergent property of discouraging jokes actively encourages this kind of misunderstanding and inability to process ambiguous titles using common sense.

My car was broken into 3pm in the afternooon in Austin last summer. Nothing visible. They emptied the console and glovebox.

They stole:

* cheap sunglasses

* tire pressure gauge

* box of bandaids

* my car's USER MANUAL, ffs

* charging cable

They left:

* small envelope with $80 cash tucked under the removable console coin holder.

* all the coins.

So very confused.

Armchair theory: taking the stereotypical idea of "squirrel on crack" both seriously and literally, maybe people on drugs become like bowerbirds with very, very broken interestingness ranking.

All the stuff you mentioned was immediately visible (so no complex problem solving to find it) and would probably look "definitely probably valuable" to a hyped up 5 year old.

Aaaaand thennnn whoever did the stealing probably just sold it all to someone else in _exactly the same condition_ (high on whatever) who also considered it valuable enough to make a fair trade to swap it all for $amount of $thing.

I'm not sure what the balance is, but it's part-hilarious and part-sad that, if this theory is correct, there's an utterly illogical commodity market being sustained by tweaked-out squirrels with half the attention span of a goldfish, leaves people scratching their heads in its wake, and is so confusingly successful people just don't park in certain places.

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