Thieves are strategic. They’re not looking around in parks for lost wallets, nor are they going to libraries hoping they can lift a bunch of unattended books.
The case in the article matches the second model, not the first. Hundreds of people realised they were in a library with no staff. Two-hundred books were taken out, presumably without anyone having to log their names. That would have made it extremely easy for them to just keep the books. But they were returned.
Having few opportunistic thieves is, one would think, a good sign of societal trust and well-being.
I'll just mention that security at UK university libraries is fairly tight, I know people who have accidently taken out books without logging them, and just kept them, and there have been cases at Cambridge where quite high-value books have gone missing.
The article states that every book taken out was returned. I see two alternatives:
1. The staff conducted a full inventory a couple of weeks after the incident and confirmed that every book is still there. (By the way, at what rate are books smuggled out even during regular opening hours?)
2. The books that were taken out were borrowed against a library card using some sort of self-checkout station.
I find option 2 much more likely, which meant the names were logged.
They can only know that the items checked out were.
My father used to think that. Turns out it's mostly untreated paranoid shizophrenia creating self fulfilling prophecies.
Two of my favorite related articles:
- Serendipity in robbery target selection[1]. Interviews with chronic robbers talks about how they cruise around looking for marks. They are strategic though in their "foraging".
- The role of territoriality in crime prevention: A field experiment[2]. Experiment with leaving a $10 gift card on a desk in Uni library. (So similar to here, unlikely people going to library intending to steal.) There were thefts - in one condition 1/30 people who passed by nicked the card.
Since a single chronic offender can commit many crimes, the current patterns of car break ins in cities are IMO likely driven by a small number of "professional" offenders, moreso than victim behavior.
[1] http://www.d-ddaily.com/images/6-1-15_Serendipity%20in%20Rob...
[2] https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1301910/1/Wortley_%26_...