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Comment by maximinus_thrax | Hacker News Reader

> They weren't interested - they told me to contact West Midlands police. So I rang them. No, they were not going to investigate: "Don't you realize how many Porsches are stolen in this city every day?" Also, they said they can't just walk in and have a look around (I guess they need a warrant, which is fair enough; but then why not get a warrant?)

I've seen/heard this numerous times. Cops really don't give a shit about theft unless it's from a business. But I wonder if you could just sue the homeowner for the bike in small claims court. Do you have something like that in your jurisdiction? I mean you can prove they're in possession of your property. Nothing criminal, just have a judge order them to at least compensate you for the bike.

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> Cops really don’t give a shit about theft unless it’s from a business.

My only experience with police and bike theft is the opposite; they police were helpful and recovered my bike. When I first called them they even suggested that I make initial contact with the thief and they’d be there to support the sting, which surprised me a lot! I found the bike a couple of weeks after it was stolen when the thief posted it for sale online, and when I called the police they let me know that the phone number was associated with a “known operator”. I didn’t end up making direct contact with the thief, an undercover officer took care of it. Several officers joined, and they were all super happy to have helped. It was overall a positive and satisfying experience.

This may be very locale-dependent, I’m in the western U.S., not Europe.

I'm also in the western, US (the PNW) and my bike was stolen a couple of years back. It had a sticker and a registration number from my apartment building, which they called and left their phone number saying they found the bike abandoned and want to return it.

I called the number, and they told me to meet up somewhere in a relatively rough neighborhood. I told them I would love to meet up in front of a police precinct which they turned down, saying they don't have a car and can't get there (told them they can ride the bike to the precinct, and I can arrange an Uber to drive them back but unsurprisingly they said no).

I called the Seattle PD and told them everything, asked if they can help me by sending someone at the meeting site. They pretty much burst out laughing, told me not to go as I will likely get robbed or worse, forget about the bike and move on with my life. (I did file a report for the stolen bike though).

I ended up getting some money from my renter's insurance. The bike was worth slightly over $1000 when it was new (was stolen after about a year). I keep my bikes indoors now.

Isn't that incredible. It's almost "We can't go with you to that place and investigate a crime because a crime might happen!"

I'm not from the US and I've only ever had positive interactions with police, but cases like this which would be low effort for them and have a useful impact on petty crime in their region, seem very frustrating.

> Isn't that incredible. It's almost "We can't go with you to that place and investigate a crime because a crime might happen!"

That's an SPD[1] problem. As a department, its worse then useless.

[1] Not that they are some weird outlier in this regard among US police forces.

That would never happen in my area in the US. The cops would probably tell you not to go but they’d be interested in every bit of info you had. If it wasn’t in their jurisdiction they’d help me find the right department.

Which Western town / city were you in?

If this is Seattle, I have heard dozens of people tell me about their stolen bikes. And every single one has said the cops basically laughed at them and told them to forget about it.

Re-read your post and it is seattle, I knew it!

This is almost certainly a UK specific experience. The police here have a track record of treating people who report crimes with disdain.

It’s no different here where I live in Australia, for small property crimes anyway. They’ll file a report at least, but nothing will happen even if you know exactly who did it and have video proof.

More universal than you might suspect. Cops treating the 'citizens' with disdain is a pretty common feature of cops, at least in my experience.

That is, sadly, a rather universal experience.

>> Cops really don't give a shit about theft unless it's from a business.

Have had my place of home and work both burglarized. The difference is that at work they show up, take tons of notes, interview you and your employees, and then ignore you.

I vastly prefer the home burglary experience. At least they're honest about not caring. Both times I had 1080p footage with clear vision of the thieves and cars. Jack shit done about it.

Rinse, repeat, and most people don't even report crimes anymore. Tada! Crime is now "going down."

It’s worrying though. It’s part of the social contract, and I worry about vigilantism rising if cops not doing anything about the majority of crime that affects most normal people is ignored, and that gets worse.

Completely agree with you. It's ruining statistical analysis of actual crime and it's developing serious apathy and nihilism in our population.

It already is rising, with all the false positives and prejudice induced mistakes you would expect. A Kenyan I know said vigilantism there relies on setting up bait for thieves and having multiple members of the community lie in wait. The thief that takes the bait is caught red handed, beaten severely, and often doused in petrol and burned alive. I said I was sure that probably kept theft pretty low, and he replied it did not, no one ever thinks they will be caught.

Which is why it's more effective to provide proper social safety net programs, work to provide economic opportunity, treat the criminal justice system and detention as rehabilitation, not punishment - and at the very least not have systems that encourage further economic stratification and the concentration of wealth.

US states with the death penalty have significantly higher murder rates than those without...

We do all of those things in Scandinavia. Bike theft is everywhere, and the police just tell you to report the crime via online self-serve.

And the homeowner is the occupant?? Probably not. Criminals like to move around.

I do have a big problem with the police ignoring cases handed them on a sliver platter even if they are minor, though. Doing this makes it effectively legal to commit said crime.

> Doing this makes it effectively legal to commit said crime.

Yeah. The same thing happens with bankster's frauds. The difference is that a fraud case is very costly to investigate and prosecute; in this case, as you put it, I gave it to them on a silver platter.

And I'd bet that they'd have recovered dozens of expensive bikes if they'd raided it, and solved at least dozens of open cases.

AND limit future thefts by the same people, and likely dissuade future thieves.

If you put the bike thieves in jail, sure. And when your e-bike gets stolen, you may well think you want them in jail. But the next week, the New York Times writes an article about how there are too many non-violent offenders in jail and the incarceration crisis is a national shame. Now the e-bike owner is outraged and wants the thief out of jail. It's not trivial to come up with a punishment that will deter the thieves without also deterring the voters from seeing it administered.

I don't think it's even about putting them in jail for a long time. The current situation has basically zero downsides to stealing a bike. You take it, you sell it, you have cash. The police don't care, they won't even investigate.

If the chances of getting caught for this sort of crime were non-zero, even if the repercussions were a heavy fine, it would hopefully make people think twice before getting involved in it.

With near zero downside, you get rampant crime in particular categories, as seen in San Francisco, or joyriding by underage kids.

How do you think a heavy fine works in practice? You tell the bike thief he needs to pay $1000. He doesn't pay. Then what? You garnish the wages from the regular job he doesn't have? (His actual job is bike thief.) You send bounty hunters?!

Let's say you finally manage to impound his car. Now there's an article about how people's lives are being ruined because of fines and mere misdemeanors. We're back to square one.

I agree. Increasing penalties is a knee-jerk reaction for some kinds of. politician; but it doesn't have any effect, because people don't get caught anyway. If there's a high risk of being caught, the thief might consider another trade.

Yeah, I know, that might just be shifting the problem - he could take up online fraud, or burglary, or mugging instead.

> I mean you can prove they're in possession of your property.

To be pedantic, I can only prove they're in possession of the GPS tracker. That cost about £250.

Yes, we have small claims. I think it costs about £50. I'd love to have (partially) got my own back; but I was very much conscious that these people might not be very nice people, and they knew where I lived.

I could have hired thieves to steal it back, I suppose; but I don't know any thieves that I trust (nor that I don't trust!)

IANAL but you don't have to prove 'beyond reasonable doubt' in civil cases, just balance of probability. If you fought this case I think you would have a very good chance of getting a judgement. Whether that gets you any actual cash is another matter.

On reflection, I guess I could have sued them for the value of the bike; it would have been a civil case, so it wouldn't have depended on proof, just on the balance of probabilities.

I doubt they would have contested it; it would have been an easy win. But they might have paid me a visit and set fire to my flat.

Or you might have prevented them from murdering someone. The probably of them coming back and burning your house down come from television but in reality this is not a murder case where they are threatening you not to appear. This isn't so personal that the 250 dollars will cause them spend time/money on a payback plan. Judging by their car they make a lot more than that nightly and you will never see a dime of that court winning.

This is scandalous. I wonder if you could somehow sue the police for not doing their job, or report the guy who refused to investigate.

At least in the US, you can't:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzale...

Not sure about other jurisdictions.

There seems to be some silly misconception that police sit around twiddling their thumbs doing their level best to ignore crime. The truth is there is far more crime being reported than they can possibly respond to, especially in places like Seattle (which has the highest per-capita rate of property crime overall in the nation, iirc).

On top of that, police staffing levels are at historic lows in some cities- in Seattle, they're at a 30-year low.

If someone isn't in immediate danger, and the situation isn't evolving, the item stolen is particularly mobile and difficult to identify (such as a commodity bike), and not worth a lot of money (cars worth much more are stolen every day) it's going to be way at the bottom of their priority list.

Property crime is up everywhere. Nothing societally has changed, so I think the onus is on you to prove they aren’t just sitting there twiddling their thumbs. With their powerful unions and patterns of “blue flu”, the police don’t exactly have a great track record of response (not even going into the weeds of armed responses gone awry).

Here is some super trivial googling for you:

https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/wa/seattle/crime

Over 46k crimes (property and violent)

1200 officers funded, though I've seen other stats that there are only 940 active employed

800k 911 calls per year

https://www.seattle.gov/police/about-us/about-the-department...

That's 3-ish 911 responses per day, assuming an average of one officer for every call. Add on top of that all of the other things happening, and you would need to be wilfully blind to believe they are sitting around with nothing better to do than look for a stolen bike.

46k crimes, that would be about 120 crimes per day for 1000 officers, probably including a lot of smaller crimes such as stolen bikes. If they never investigate a stolen bike (esp. in that case where the stolen bike was localized), they make bike stealing de facto legal. That being said, I understand they need to prioritize.

911 calls can’t be used in this metric since they encompass non-police emergencies and non-emergencies as well.

So going off reported crimes, we have 1/10 of a crime per officer per day, or maybe better put, 1 crime per 10 days per officer. So tell me more about how they’re not twiddling their thumbs. Even accounting for administrative work (court appearances, paperwork, etc), that is a ridiculously low crime response rate.

You can't seriously write off 800,000 emergency calls because "maybe not all of them require police response", and then presume that 9/10 police officers sit around twiddling their thumbs. This is pure intellectual dishonesty.

Edit: Also, there's more that police do than administrative paperwork and investigating crime. I'd hazard a guess that a plurality, if not a majority, of police officers on any given shift are walking a beat, patrolling, enforcing traffic laws (i.e. speed limits), car crashes, etc.

SPD hasn't done any meaningful traffic enforcement for years. The roads are an utter madhouse.

They might show up to a car crash, though.

> (which has the highest per-capita rate of property crime overall in the nation, iirc).

12th on burglary, 13th on larceny, 40th on motor vehicle theft, 14th 'total' out of 100 US cities.

51st on violent crime, though, so surely, there should be plenty of police resources that aren't devoted on homicides and assaults and drug violence, and other things of that nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

> unless it’s from a business

To further clarify, unless it’s a business that makes routine donations to the police department.

Police started out as private business protection for those who paid, mafia style, and they haven’t changed since then.

in the US I have actually gotten police to respond the homeless issues when calling as a business. not 100%, but they often send someone out. have not paid them off yet.

as a resident? if I call the non-emergency line they just laugh and tell me to move.

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