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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

“The dramatically increased rate of Hyundai and Kia theft in Baltimore has required city and police resources that would not have been needed but for Hyundai and Kia’s deliberate failures,”

I'd like to see the data here. Is there any indication that the crime wouldn't be present in other areas of life? Would the people committing these crimes be law-abiding citizens if not for the temptation of these cars being easier to steal? Or would the police resources be spent on alternate crimes? It seems the common denominator here is people willing to commit crimes, not the city's claim that it "would not have been" if the company increased security.

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This. The problem is that Baltimore treats crime as being separate from criminals.

Almost all crime is committed by a tiny, tiny group of people - in NYC, 327 people commit 1/3rd of all shoplifting. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre...

We used to just warehouse people like this, and we stopped because that was mean and did not get us likes on Instagram.

There is a theoretical limit to the rate at which a society can digest unsocialized people, and this is affected by the exposed surface area of the clumps of unsocialized people. Where by “unsocialized” I mean with respect to that particular society - people in any society are “unsocialized” with respect to any other sufficiently separate society. We seem to have run into a case of serious indigestion. Traditionally we warehoused people who weren’t being digested successfully. Why we stopped is a really interesting question.

I absolutely agree. I hate that "lock up criminals" has become a race-loaded statement, because in Baltimore (and in my neighborhood) the victims are Black/POC. This doesn't impact Becky on IG, it impacts the older people who spent their lives turning America's urban areas around.

It's really, really unjust.

Do you have any tangible data to back up the first sentence or is it just a desire to avoid facing hard reality?

You mean the hard reality that a society can digest an infinite number of unsocialized people instantaneously?

Here’s the link that I posted above with data showing the before and after. It’s quite stark just how big of a spike there has been in theft. https://usafacts.org/data-projects/car-thefts

Not exactly the data I was looking for. This is very niche and not from a more comprehensive level. However, the city level data seems to show that some cities are not seeing a higher spike, but others are. Without any real analysis, this seems to indicate that there are other factors at play than simply Kias being easier to steal.

Why are people disagreeing with this? If you run an experiment looking at a variable change and it doesn't change much in some places but changes a lot in others, then wouldn't this prove that there are other variables at play - that it couldn't possibly be that single variable itself?

They might be committing other crimes, but at least they would not be speeding around in stolen Kias and Hyundais. That seems like a win.

Easily stolen cars lead to nuisance behavior that affects far more than the immediate victim of the theft.

That depends. It's likely less of an issue if they know they can steal a car without confrontation than say car jacking or robbery, which carry a higher risk of people being hurt.

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