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Comment by awbraunstein | Hacker News Reader

My van was stolen outside my apartment in Oakland a few years ago. I called in to report it had been stolen and got a call back less than 5 minutes later by an officer who was with my van in another part of town about to have it towed. It was just parked in the middle of the road.

When I got there to pick it up, I found other people's stolen mail, hundreds of feet of speaker wire, a car stereo, and a lunchbox full of hundreds of house keys among other items. It was as if they used it as a heistmobile. Unfortunately, a lot of my stuff was stolen like a camera and some clothing, but they didn't touch the thousands of dollars worth of climbing and snowboarding gear. It was almost as if they didn't even know what it was.

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I was at an Airbnb in Alameda a few years ago for RSA Conference. My boss' rental car was illegally towed from our designated parking space, in the middle of the night. That sucked to notice in the morning. We took an Uber to get to the ferry, while my boss called the police to report it stolen, they already had information that it was towed. He got the car back pretty quick. They had guard dogs at the towing place apparently. I don't remember the rest of the details, since getting the car back was all second hand story.

The next day we drove into SF with the car cause we needed it to pick up some things. We street parked somewhere, to go for dinner, and almost immediately a cop walked up to us and told us we really shouldn't park there otherwise the car will get stolen. We were like wtf geez, okay then. Iiirc we found a parking garage instead.

So yeah, as a Canadian, wtf San Francisco, get your shit together!

sf is worst for car break-ins. organized crime drive down the street with one person walking and looking in cars. if they see something they bust the window, grab the stuff, hop in the van.

frustratingly it seems an easy problem to solve. given it's likely a few small groups it should only take a few honeypot cars to catch them.

Sf effectively has no police tho

They probably didn’t, as you are most likely aware.

I remember distinctly as a kid my older brother’s car getting broken into in North Texas. The thieves broke a window and stole my CD case from his truck. Circa 2004-2006, they did $400 USD worth of damage and got probably $40 worth of Rush, Styx, Rich Mullins and Blink 182 cd’s, mixture of original and burned. I am pretty sure given the questionable taste and definitely questionable mix that they didn’t get their money’s worth.

Tl;dr thieves often have no idea how much stuff is actually worth and will happily do 10x worth of damage for a perceived 10% gain

It’s like thieves who would rather steal a bicycle and abandon it at destination than wait for the bus/buy a bus ticket.

Saves them 2$ and 10 mins, costs someone else a new bike and being on foot for a couple weeks.

reminds me of tagging. easy to do property destruction costs 100x to fix

I think both your example and parent's example are distinctly different from my example in terms of motivations.

In my (grandparent) example, motivation appeared to be purely money. In parent's example, motivation was mostly transportation and convenience. And a total selfish disregard of everyone else but themselves is present, just like in my example. In your example, motivation is several things that take a fair amount of time to unwrap. And it really depends on type of tagging. Something that Banksy tags, for instance, is on a different level than some "420 blaze it" that you would see on a highway underpass.

It's fair to say in all three cases that the person doing the bad is being callous - a disregard of the property owner's time and money occurs. In the former cases, it's from a space of likely callous disrespect. But in the latter cases, like the Banksy-esque ones, it's intentional.

I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to say here beyond that tagging isn't just a knee-jerk bad thing. I guess I want to say "people who are taggers generally suck, but there are a few people who are awesome that also tag so don't throw all people who do tagging into a single bucket of suck

tagging is 99.9999% a bad thing. I challenge you to walk down Mission St in san francisco and find a single instance of Bansky level commentary. Also, I don't define what Bansky does as tagging. Tagging is basically writing your name/nickname/logo or just writing something meaningless like "fuck the man".

That is not to say I think Bansky's property destruction is ok. I'm happy to see the art, not happy to have someone's property destroyed. I'm really happy when artist get permission (and sponsored) to make street art. Plenty of that in SF.

To anyone that disagrees tell me where you live and I'll be happy to come tag your house and your car and your laptop PC and see if you really find it ok

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