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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

My personal experience from a home invasion where the individual caused a not insignificant amount of damage to the home resulted in nothing more than the police merely filing in a form and handing me a receipt.

My personal experience from coming home to a burgled also ended with the same situation. The police came, waited from crime lab to take prints, prints were not recoverable, no follow up. This was even after several attempts at providing the assigned detective detailed information from the bank on how the criminal's attempted to use a stolen checkbook to withdraw money from a bank account. The detective later explained that he's too busy to look at information provided via email.

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Yep. I've seen (and personally experienced) individuals and small businesses suffer property crime ranging from low thousands to upper five figures. Not once has any amount of evidence, including the aforementioned faces-and-license-plates video evidence, or in another case multiple credit card transactions at places that assuredly have cameras covering both the register and parking lot (and at least once at a hotel, which means they made a copy of an ID, even though it may have been fake), convinced the cops to do anything whatsoever aside from offer to issue a report for insurance (for a fee, the assholes). I've even seen a case of this plainly being an ongoing spree with video placing the same people and vehicles multiple places. Cops didn't care, even though the criminals were still working and hitting places every day or two.

Middle-class white people in every case, just to eliminate any race angle. Maybe richer folks have a better time, IDK. This isn't even the allegedly-lawless-hellhole of San Francisco or anything remotely like that.

Cops in my area did a sting operation to find out who was putting trash into one of the municipality's wealthy benefactor's trash bins at night. They also did a six month investigation to catch some high school kid who spray painted "BLM" on a street, but completely ignored whoever wrote "WLM 2" next to it the next day.

The police know who they work for, and they will expend all the resources they have to go after people they simply just don't like, no matter how petty the crime.

I'm genuinely shocked that you even got them to take prints at all. I've been robbed before and the most police have done is fill out a police report.

I'm shocked that the police even took prints. When my house was burglarized, they looked around and then told us to file a report and left.

The crime lab said it was rare for them to make an appearance. He said if there had been a dead body, they'd have brought out all the toys to do forensics. I gently reminded him that I would have been the dead body in question, and the whole conversation was soured after that.

So depressing to hear. I’m really sorry you had to go through all that.

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