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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

> Police only work _AFTER_ the car has been stolen.

Right.. but the goal of the police work is to find the criminal and put them in jail for a while. This is meant to be a social deterrent, wherein, the punishment for the crime makes committing the crime not worthwhile.

> When you have somebody actively looking to steal $THING, they will find it and steal it.

Exactly.. which is why we use jail. You also seem to be suggesting that the lack of anti theft wouldn't matter to the overall rate, it just makes these particular cars more likely to be targeted. There are obvious and measurable problems with this idea.

> So it is a failure of policy, not policing.

Well.. if you don't have enough police to actually find and put criminals in jail, you can call that a policy problem, but the policy failure is simply not having enough police.

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Not to mention incapacitation! It's really hard to steal cars from prison!

A very small percentage of people commit a shockingly high proportion of crime. In NYC, a third of shoplifting cases were committed by 327 people who were arrested over 6,000 times. That's just the times they were caught and arrested.

I can't find nationally representative data, but in Colorado, a news station looked at 10 randomly selected criminal cases for vehicle theft in 2021-2022. Every single one of the suspects had been accused of stealing cars more than once. Collectively they faced auto theft charges in 43 cases.

> You also seem to be suggesting that the lack of anti theft wouldn't matter to the overall rate, it just makes these particular cars more likely to be targeted.

I don't see that implication in the post you are replying to. The widespread dissemination of information showing how comparatively easy it is to steal these makes of cars may be expected to divert some thieves from targeting other makes to these particular ones, but it may also be expected to bring in others who would not have been disposed to steal a car until they learned of the relative ease with which these makes may be stolen.

> but it may also be expected to bring in others who would not have been disposed to steal a car until they learned of the relative ease with which these makes may be stolen.

The logical problem with this is, are there people, who, no matter how easy it is to steal a car, just would never steal one?

If those people exist, then you're misattributing the source of this crime to the vehicle, when all along, it was with the individual. While there are obvious "thresholds to criminality" involved here, if you can measure a difference in space (e.g. theft rate of Korea vs USA) you again can be pretty confident it's an individual issue and not a product issue.

The other side is, perhaps our crime reduction measures have worked, and prevent many people who /would/ otherwise steal or commit crimes prevented from doing so, and a single breach in this system reveals what was true all along. You haven't removed criminals, you've just reduced their incentives to a point where they don't commit crime.

All highly suggestive of what the actual problem is here.

The first problem with your argument is here: "The logical problem with this is, are there people, who, no matter how easy it is to steal a car, just would never steal one?" My post is not predicated on the assumption that there are no such people.

The second problem is here: "If those people exist, then you're misattributing the source of this crime to the vehicle, when all along, it was with the individual." This is an example of the "single cause" fallacy. From there on, all your claims fall like a line of dominoes.

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