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Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

Why annoy people like this? My e-bike has Find My tracking built in to the firmware. As long as you don’t steal my bike you have no privacy concerns from me securing my bike. Even better I can track my bike down without involving the police, so the potential thief doesn’t even have to worry about being shot by some trigger happy cop.

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In many areas of the US, that trigger happy cop will be the difference between you recovering your property and you being severely beaten when you show up in a rough neighborhood trying to get your bike back.

In my experience, the most an American cop is going to do to help you resolve a property crime is take a report. If they happen to find the item, you _may_ get it back.

However this is a required step for submitting to many consumer insurance programs

And probably the answer for why things are the way they are: most people likely just want the report for insurance payout, and not getting their used thing back.

> In many areas of the US, that trigger happy cop will be the difference between you recovering your propert

A cop's not going to get your bike back. They'll write a report and then throw it away when you leave.

In what area of the US do the police actually recover bikes?

If you show the police officer a live location of your stolen property moving on a map, that's usually enough to motivate them into action. I've seen two stolen phones recovered this way. If you tell them your bike is stolen and that's all the information you have, they rightly deduce that there's almost no chance of you getting it back.

There's tons of people who've posted about people telling cops exactly which house their stolen property is in (using Find My Phone/Whatever) and cops simply saying they can't/won't do anything.

This is what happens most of the time -- cops just don't care in the majority of cases.

That's why it's important to be friends with ex-Special Forces and ex-MMA fighters.

Is “cop shoots bike thief” something you actually think is common enough to note?

This implies a concerning reality departure.

The police department is recommending people store their documents in an always-visible pouch to avoid getting shot.

https://dps.mn.gov/divisions/ooc/news-releases/Pages/dps-par...

This is a solution in the same way anti-homeless design is a solution

And they called the pouches "not reaching pouches". I wonder if they get the irony of "not reaching".

The sad reality is buried under so many layers of derangement, I can’t really understand what exactly they are trying to solve here

> deadly force encounters can be catastrophic for police officers

Oy vey.

At least where I live it is. I’ve personally witnessed two instances of excessive force and been a victim of excessive force myself.

And the last police shooting was ultimately about stolen property. They killed a father to be and a fetus over a suspected stolen car.

So no, I haven’t departed reality. But yes, not all police departments are like this (mine specifically has been under federal oversight for years).

> At least where I live it is

In the US? I wonder which part of the US (if I may ask)

> last police shooting .. killed a father ..

How sad that they did that. (If it got covered by any news, it'd be interesting (or is there a better word) to read)

I don't know if this is the case, but it seems to match:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/10/oakland-eri...

https://www.ktvu.com/news/attorney-for-brianna-colombo-confi...

I find the wording itself interesting. I guess it's a sort of class-tribalism that's developed to the point where it's so ingrained in some people's mindsets that they causally append bizarre comments like that to their sentences.

Broadcasting your bona fides far and wide is certainly en vogue in certain circles; anecdotally speaking, the incidence of people manifesting their vanilla pronouns is orders of magnitude higher than otherwise.

Seems it's on par with yelling go packers or similar at a crowded bar.

> Why annoy people like this?

Does it matter? Someone is going to do it anyway. They might just think that it's funny that they can make all the tags in the subway car start making noise.

So maybe the question should be "why did Apple design it to allow this?".

What if someone else is tracking your bike? Or backpack, or car, etc? GPS trackers exist so this doesn't eliminate that concern, but at least if someone tries tracking you with an AirTag you have an option to locate it.

Great, now instead of getting shot by a cop you’ll get the crap kicked out of you instead.

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