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Comment by quatrefoil | Hacker News Reader

Solving different crimes. The ones you might get a promotion or some other gratification out of.

If you're in a city with 1,000+ home burglaries a year, nobody cares that you clear one and arrest some meth head. But, solve some gruesome or politically-tinged crime and you're holding a press conference and getting praise left and right.

We do the same thing as software engineers. Every large company has some lore about what types of work get you promoted, and many engineers prefer to work on that.

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This is probably the answer. And so how can we exploit that to get OUR case worked on? Involve the journalists sounds like one. Message your city hall people might be another. Take to twitter? What else? Offer a reward (thus getting more response from all the rest - not to claim the reward but to blab about it) What else?

What size is the city with 1000+ burglaries in a year? What is the value of the houses they target? If there are several million houses in the city than 1000 might be close enough to nothing to ignore. However if there are only 2000 houses in the city 1000 is half and enough to get attention - you bet the police care about solving at least some of them.

Often the police know who the criminals in town are. However they lack evidence to prove anything. Thus a camera feed showing an already known criminal is enough to get their attention as while they might not care about you directly they criminal who hit you may have also hit a high importance target but they cannot prove it in court - thus convicting them of hitting you helps them for cases they cannot prove.

If football players get robbed while on tv playing in a game, you or I have zero hope to prevent a burglary short of an armed guard or a few dogs.

> Solving different crimes. The ones you might get a promotion or some other gratification out of.

Actually crime against persons (murder, assault, armed robbery) have higher priority than simple burglaries. Having your property taken away is infuriating but no one can argue that stoping a violent criminal is more important.

Maybe?

First, a lot of simple assault arrests are for objectionable but ultimately trivial stuff - people getting into drunken brawls, spitting on each other, and so on. A series of burglaries targeting a local small business can be far more devastating to the owner than that.

But your argument also doesn't hold because it's clear that there are property crimes that are investigated with zeal. For example, in the SF Bay Area, a person was recently charged with "hate crimes" for taking down some pro-Palestine signs. I'm not making some political point here, but we can agree that the investigation wasn't motivated by the severity of the crime, right?

I'm always astonished when a cop shoots someone, the body camera video is released within a week. I was nearly killed by a bad driver and it took 5+ months to get the video and the driver was already processed by the kangaroo court.

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