I wonder if any of those 'fallen' boxes were deliberately dropped in an area covered by CCTV just to catch opportunistic thieves?
It would certainly be a good way to catch one type of thief while entirely missing the biggest heists.
If you find an object with no obvious owner, you either leave it where it lies, or you report it by turning it in somewhere. To the business where you found it, or the Lost & Found department of the transit authority, or the police if all else fails.
I don't see anyone calling up the police to say, "Hi, I found <item> and I'll keep it until someone comes over here to claim it!" because the only people coming over will be the police themselves.
Every place with a Lost & Found service, and the police, regularly liquidate the unclaimed property. You can find lists and auctions on your civic website if they're selling the stuff. They may also donate it to charity or destroy it.
The police or anyone else are not going to stick a tag on a box with your name and number so you can come to claim it after the grace period elapses. That's not how claiming stuff works.
If a package falls off a truck in front of your house you can pick it up and inform the authorities, who'll in turn inform the owner.
If the police or owner care enough to pick it up they can have it, but presumably there's cases where they can't be bothered, then it becomes abandoned property and you can keep it.
Just because you find abandoned property you don't need to go out of your way to mail it to the owner, just inform them and they can come to you.
The "why not just leave it?" aspect of this is easily defended, if the package e.g. contains electronics they'd be damaged by exposure to the elements.
This of course varies a lot by jurisdiction, but yes, in many places that is exactly what the police will do.
One hypothetical scenario:
1. Thieves stop a train somehow, spill containers for distraction, run away with valuables.
2. Idiots see stuff lying on the ground and go pick it up causing chaos and confusion.
3. Police arrest some of the idiots. Win win. Thieves go away free and police can claim they arrested some people. This also pads their numbers. Politicians can pretend they were not asleep at the wheel with organized crime under their nose because look only 5% of arrests were organized crime. All we needed to do is arrest more homeless people.
You have some nerve to equivocate between an anonymous object bearing no clues as to its ownership and a box with an address label on it signifying exactly to whom the parcel belongs. How do you blame an owner who likely lives hundreds if not thousands of miles away for not contacting every police precinct along the shipping path instead of expecting someone who finds the parcel to simply return it to the shipping company so that they can finish the job?
> provided you report it to the authorities and nobody claims it in some time frame
One would expect that "report it to the authorities" covers that problem. The authorities will take care of either contacting the shipping company and letting them know, instructing you on how to do it yourself, or even take possession of the package to return it themselves.
I'd say an anonymous parcel on private land is the concern of the landowner, even with a right-of-way.
So it's theft either way, but the private-ness of the zone may mean additional crimes are getting committed, such as trespassing and/or burglary. (Or worse variations of the same crime, depending on how the laws are written.)
(Also even when a wily Sicilian complains that "You're trying to kidnap what I've rightfully stolen".)
All they said is that the other person, Wallet-Dropper, is something less than the prima facie legal owner. This permits several possibilities, but in every case Wallet-Taker still seems to be doing something wrong:
1. If Wallet-Dropper is a thief, then Wallet-Taker is just a thief stealing from a thief.
2. If Wallet-Dropper is the well-meaning temporary custodian of unclaimed property that they cannot (yet) claim as their own, then Wallet-Taker is a thief, taking to deprive the legal owner (wherever they are) of their property.
3. If Wallet-Dropper is the new legal owner of the discovered cash, that's theft by Wallet-Taker no matter how much you think Wallet-Dropper "didn't really earn it."
What is written in the books.
What is practiced by law enforcement and the judicial system.
So while dropping your wallet in the street may technically be a crime, the idea that law enforcement is going to go about seeking justice for the infraction is pretty much laughable in the vast majority of situations unless there is a large amount of corroborating evidence.
>(Also, I don't think anyone would consider it "finders keepers" if the thief started using the credit-cards!)
I mean, that is its own separate crime, and the only one likely to be punished as there is a direct evidence chain where you're accessing an account without permission and performing the act of theft.