Bay Area car owners leaving trunks open while parked amid wave of car break-ins | Hacker News Reader

Bay Area car owners leaving trunks open while parked amid wave of car break-ins

newsweek.com

36 pointskerneloftruth61 comments

I think this is indicative of the slow break down of civil society.

To some extent you can "throw more cops" at the problem, but at some point, you have to realize that it's the people, the society and what they put up with. Be it at home, in school, in pop culture, etc. Accepting petty crime as part of every day life eventually erodes enough civility that at some point the criminals realize they have overwhelmed the system.

People are afraid to speak up when Johnny does something inappropriate. "How dare you scold my kid". There is no longer much social pressure to conform. It has good aspects (people can now do activities that harm no one else and no one will bat an eye, but also this same sword allows opportunists to take advantage of the situation. It's a multi decade phenomenon. At some point, people will get fed up and the stars will align and the pendulum will swing the other way (Wild West initially vs Statehood later on)

I don't think SF's situation is indicative of civil society.

This is very specific to crime issues of the Bay. There are places in the world where I could leave my wallet at a restaurant, walk away to go to the bathroom and it would be waiting for me when I was back.

Even here in Boston I would be pretty surprised if I did that and my wallet were stolen anywhere but the most high-throughput of places like a highway rest stop. A restaurant? I'd be shocked.

The world is a lot less dangerous than I think a lot of people believe.

SF is signaling it’s ok to be a criminal, because maybe someone was poor and doesn’t know better?

even if it’s true there will be people to take advantage of it. the sf bay created its own toxic political environment and they’re paying the price.

this kind of overall breakdown is happening in places that aren't just SF though. I moved away from my hometown in South Dakota, moved back a few years later, and was shocked to see how much more common theft is at stores, how most gas stations near major roads now have hired security at night, and so forth. local law enforcement is constantly putting out PSAs telling people to not leave firearms in their unlocked vehicles at night as they're being stolen and used in crime.

What's the rate of opioid and amphetamine abuse there?

exactly, that has been a major contributor of the problem in the timespan I'm talking about (decade or so).

I once left my wallet in a bar in China. I came back for it a few hours later and it was still there.

Also left my bag with my laptop in a bar in Denmark once and it was there the day after, when I came back looking for it.

I don't really think it's "culture." I think that culture and the environment you grow up in can make you think something is a good idea or even "cool." People might not feel like there is a better option. But I think ultimately the issue is that there really isn't much of a better option. De-unionization and wage stagnation has made it basically impossible to live with any dignity on a multiple tiers of jobs. Maybe the culture that certain classes of people don't deserve a living wage is contributing to this?

There is some of that: multi-decade hollowing out of the working class. Undermine their ability to negotiate wages by off-shoring their labor (manufacturing --white goods, for example) or importing cheap labor (services --meat processors, for example).

On the other hand, we had the 'Hoover' years and shanty towns and people out of jobs and people begging for scraps during the dustbowl and depression years but we still had the glue of civil society to hold us together. But now, the working man and working woman can't earn an honest day's wages and we've moved to a more laissez faire attitude to what happens on the street (It's okay to shit on the sidewalk, inject, threaten pedestrians, etc.) In the extreme, it's considered 'establishment' to want civility --but even mayor Breed is fed up with the BS from the BoS and their promoters.

The next step is a backlash where police officers (and private security guards) start meting out rough justice by beating and shooting suspects in the street rather than bothering to arrest them. Sure there have been isolated cases of that before but it's not a systemic nationwide problem. We risk turning into another Brazil. Not a good situation.

> I think this is indicative of the slow break down of civil society.

If by “this” you mean people treating the current incarnation of Newsweek as if it were a serious media outlet and not an online supermarket tabloids wearing the skin of a dead journalistic enterprise as a disguise, then, sure.

> Photos posted on social media and shared by the San Francisco-based news station KGO-TV showed two SUVs parked side by side along an Oakland street.

I couldn't find the photos or the newscast on TFA; what's interesting is just exactly how little content is on this page. Even the description of these photos mentions there are just two trunks open.

Is this news? Is it even really happening? Seems like it could have just as easily been two people returning from the store at the same time. Although I'm not sure I'd be taxi'ing groceries with my trunk open in oakland, but it's certainly something I've done elsewhere.

I found a video here: https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-car-break-ins-oakland-why...

These are trunks open in the middle of the day right outside of businesses, there's no interview with any of the owners, it's just a photo with two trunks open in the middle of the day with a metric ton of conjecture around it.

There's not a shred of even _circumstantial_ evidence in this whole news piece.

Then they went off and interviewed police and asking them if they had ever heard of it. THEY ARE STUNNED. Of course they are; this was completely fabricated.

I agree; we don't know why the trunks where left open. There was no investigation into the matter. Assumptions are being made here. This is shallow news reporting.

This is an annoying aspect of many news articles where they reference events without ever providing links. This makes it difficult to decipher whether the claims are made up or not.

Crazy why this is happening in a developed country. Why not just put cameras everywhere, track and remove these people forever? It shouldn't be so hard to do - they aren't some organised crime, just a bunch of homeless drug addicts.

Atlanta has one of the highest surveillance cameras per capita rates in the world and people who live in certain neighborhoods there know to leave their car doors unlocked to avoid getting their windows smashed. Having lots of cameras don't do you any good if no one watches or reviews them. Also many of these thieves are already well known to the police and get little more than time-served when they go before a judge for the nth time for the same crime. The jail there has been chronically overflowing for decades, even after multiple court decrees declaring such overcrowding to be illegal. There's little appetite to keep expanding jail space, so even if judges started handing out harsher sentences, unless the crime becomes one that requires prison rather than jail, there's no where to put the thieves when caught.

Why little appetite? What's difficulty building massive (possibly housing many millions, to deter people properly), gulag-style camps? And make sure to keep them till they become too old to be a serious threat.

Seriously, just clean the streets.

Any source for Atlanta? I’ve never heard of high surveillance or anything.

Maybe instead of creating a police state to "remove people forever", we should make sure people don't become homeless drug addicts in the first place?

The US has a dearth of psychiatric beds available, with 14 beds per 100k population. The EU for comparison has 69. Experts say you need at least 50. [0] [1].

You have all these people that need help, but have no way of getting it. Add to that the rampant inequality and the high cost of housing and it's no surprise things got this bad.

We need to fix the systemic issues, not just lock up some poor souls that were failed by the system.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2017/11/30/567477160/how-the-loss-of-u-s...

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/e...

this is a naive view of the world. not all homelessness is involuntary. the issue is much more complex than "why don't we just do more to help these people?"

I'm from Austria and homelessness is a non-issue here. There's 15k homeless in the entire country. [0]

I can't even remember the last time I saw a homeless person in Vienna, a city of two million people. The reason it's like that is because we fixed the systemic issues that plague the US. [1]

It's not my view of the world that's naive. It's yours that's overly cynical and that cynicism is holding your country back.

[0] https://www.feantsa.org/download/austria-2017859919493467368...

[1] https://crosscut.com/2017/06/homelessness-housing-crisis-sea...

Factoring for population that's almost identical.

0.16% for Austria and 0.17% for the US, given my back of the envelope math and a quick Google search.

You sure those systemic issues are fixed?

edit: Numbers I used.

Austria 8933346[0]/15000[1] - 0.16%

US: 330000000[2]/580466[3] - 0.17%

[0]https://www.migration.gv.at/en/living-and-working-in-austria...

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596289

[2]https://www.census.gov/popclock/

[3]https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...

Very interesting, I can't argue with your math, props to you!

I have however lived in cities in both the US and Austria extensively and can anecdotally tell you the homelessness doesn't even compare.

If all those numbers are correct, I would assume it's a distribution issue? Maybe there's a small percentage of homeless folks all over Austria, while they're a lot more segregated into certain cities in the US?

Yes these are called sanctuary cities - liberal-ran cities where bosses just seem to love bums.

How do you propose to "remove" them "forever"? Are you suggesting the death penalty for petty theft? Or housing them and feeding them for the rest of their lives without possibility of parole or remediation?

The US already has more prisoners per capita than any other country in the world. Is the "throw everybody you don't like in jail" approach actually working?

Massive, multimillion people gulag style camp system where people are forced to work on infrastructure projects for 10-15 year sentences (till they are too old to be a threat anymore), for yes things like petty theft. And yes this system must be built with an explicit goal to make a profit and have no outside funding. If it makes no profit, simplify security (less fancy cameras, guard shifts etc and more bullets).

Eradicate the motivation for behaviour like that - make sure people know that stealing stuff from cars results in a multiple year incarceration with hard work and a bullet for minimal disobeyance (and probably, because we all know nearly none of these people can get fixed, with a goal of destroying their health and physical abilities to the point they really won't be a threat once released).

Or there could even just be civilian clothed police and arrest and prosecute the perpetrators... Should give a hint in reasonable amount of time...

That would be racist.

Why should anyone have any freedom or privacy, really? We could have much less crime under a totalitarian system.

Also, to where do you propose to "remove" these people forever, and how much would that cost? Is this a proposal for a "final solution"?

History does seem to point towards the public welcoming more totalitarian systems when more free systems fail to address issues such as public safety. Regardless of if that's good for the public in the long run or not doesn't stop it from seeming like a good idea at the time when the "free" system shows no hope of being able to address the situation.

There's no "freedom" to break into people's cars, and there shouldn't be.

I think the argument isn't that people should be free to do that, but that it may not be worth giving that level of observational ability to the governing body to stop car break ins.

This has to be a troll post. And it seems to have worked.

They didn't just sprout out of the ground. They are not the cause, they are also a symptom of a broken system.

Wouldn't an open trunk run the risk of turning into a poop trunk?

But I suppose even that would be easier to clean up (even if far more gross) than fixing a forcibly-popped trunk.

Pooping outside seems just as simple / easy, and that keeps the car clean so you can sleep inside...

Not sure why anyone would decide to poop in a trunk.

I remember when a co-worker whom lived in SF (Outer Richmond, iirc) notified the team they would be late to work.

Apparently, this coworker’s garage door had a small hole in it where a wood knot once was. At night, someone decided it would be a good idea to poop through it. In the morning he opened the garage door and essentially poo flung all up and down his car and into the garage.

Talk about having a shitty day.

Spite?

Do the thieves re-secure your car after they steal everything of value from it? If not, then aren't you at risk of a "poop trunk" anyway?

Presumably a trunk that's always left open would have more poopable hours than a trunk that's forced open once a month or whatever.

I like the way you think!

I have experienced two car break-ins since moving to the Bay Area. For those of you who have never lived or visited here before, you may find it surprising to see "don't leave valuables in your car" signs are posted everywhere in most parking lots. Its the sign of the times (literally). I remember growing up in other parts of California where car break-ins were rare and wasn't something you always had to think about. Its sad to see how rampant it is now.

It is not going to take a super sophisticated AI program to predict whether we will be seeing lots of op-eds soon telling us we need to double the law enforcement budgets to solve these problems. Speaking of AI, we are a lot more easily manipulated by stories like this than AI would ever be. Humans don't pay attention to where the majority of our tax dollars are going; at least AI would be numerically based instead of purely emotional reactionary voting.

What's the easiest way to dispose of your trash in San Francisco? Gift-wrap it and leave it on the front seat of your car!

Out of curiosity, anyone has an idea of the technology involved:

>Oakland Deputy Chief of Police Drennon Lindsey told the station that residents should be aware that some thieves have technology that enables them to locate items like laptops if left hidden in an unattended vehicle.

I mean x-ray visors or what?

This could be a generic claim, but some devices are detectible in low power mode via BTLE / Wifi emissions. I would generalize though that this is more a scare comment for people not to leave valuables in the car.

I have been warned of this before. Technically it seems easy enough. I do not treat it as a scare tactic but would be interested in hearing opinions on it from others.

The easiest response is just don’t leave valuables in the car. Otherwise 100% expect you are tracked for advertising purposes in stores via fingerprinting. Have been for years.

A whole new market is created (out of nothing) for Faraday bags?

Homeless drug addicts don’t have BTLE sniffing equipment. It is more likely techbros looking for laptops with valuable information on them.

Oh I agree I think it’s just to scare people into thinking about leaving stuff.

A hand-held hammer.

You hold it up to the car window, then break the glass with a sharp tap. Reach in and flip down the back seat. Then you can see what's in the trunk.

Not as high-tech as you were imagining, but it does enable you "to locate items like laptops left hidden in an unattended vehicle".

Well, that is low-tech and I believe its usage is independent from an item like a laptop being or not being present.

BTW breaking a car glass with a hammer is not as easy as you may think, you need a very, very sharp point to break it, a spring loaded device would be much more effective:

https://newsroom.aaa.com/2019/07/vehicle-escape-tools-testin...

> Well, that is low-tech and I believe its usage is > independent from an item like a laptop being or not being present

Any device you use to detect the laptop gets used whether or not the laptop is present.

Sure, but I thought that the reference was that of a non-destructive test, otherwise the Police advice becomes "obvious".

I read it as:

"do not leave laptops in cars, because those cars, thanks to the advanced technology some thieves possess, are more likely to have their windows broken (and the laptop stolen)"

maybe it was to be read as:

"do not leave laptops in cars, because ALL cars will have their windows broken, but if there is no laptop inside, it won't be stolen"

I am assuming its something related to the magic fentanyl police keep spreading propaganda about, often with elaborate cosplay.

Police scare tactics (and the the scare tactics of the various—disproportionately right-wing extremist—snake oil peddlers police employ as consultants about the vast array of things they don't understand) often have very tenuous, if any, relation to facts.

Are neighborhood watches not a thing? Cell phones and baseball bats would probably help keep people from busting into cars. I mean this genuinely: When the police fail, it is up to the citizens to secure themselves and their property.

These thieves are skilled. I've seen videos where it takes them no more than 3-5 seconds to break window, grab something, and get into a getaway vehicle.

You can watch outside nonstop, like a camera would, but these things happen so quickly that the chance of you being able to do anything beyond maybe seeing the license plate of the getaway vehicle is pretty low.

To protect against this requires money (secured garage/parking), not just vigilantism.

The dearth of supporting information in TFA (one unreliable witness, and a whole bunch of conjecture and assumptions) is an example of why Newsweek is blocked in my Apple News feed. It's not the printed news weekly your Mom used to subscribe to, it's now online-only clickbait AFAICT. I mean, how much verifiable content is on that page? Is there any?

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