1000 cars could probably be had, new, for $30M. Not much for a large city or state. San Francisco’s city budget is in excess of 14B this year: https://www.kqed.org/news/11957640/budget-deep-dive-san-fran.... Seems like a trivial investment to reduce the #1 crime people have come to associate with your city.

The guaranteed return is citizens not having their cars broken into. Better tourism, better economic opportunities (you can do a lot more business when you’re not worried about a degenerate breaking your windows).

And anyway, you probably need closer to 10 cars. You don’t need very many high profile prosecutions before the average person gets the message.