Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief

In the US it is because District Attorneys have an explicit, open policy of not prosecuting petty crime. That has led to police not investigating or arresting, because there is no point.

https://crownschool.uchicago.edu/news-events/magazine/leadin...

Wasn’t this the broken windows philosophy that may or may not have reduced crime in NYC in the mid 90s?

It seems like cracking down on low level crime should reduce bigger crimes, but the research seems to become politicized based on who instituted the policy.

> because policing in general is not at the standard it once was. Currently police are only rewarded for "big busts"

Sure. The point is this is a matter of policy. Someone's policy. Some people in there (1) choose to prioritize this or that, (2) choose to reward doing nothing, (3) choose to promote those who do that, etc, (all the way to) actively protect cops who are active nuisances themselves.

This does not "just happen" except in the sense of "it has become acceptable". Accepted by whom? Voters at some point? But not always. In the US, most cops are extremely well insulated from the voters. And they haven't had to care about your standards for a long time. If ever really.

I don't even think that it's lucrative per se, but rather that it's straightforward. Cop sits there playing candy crush, magical radar artifact makes a noise, they look up, chase down that car, then check a box on a pre-printed citation where they don't even have to think about which law to cite. But (real example) same road, clearly marked as trucks prohibited from left two lanes - a shed larger than many houses meanders by in the third lane, hanging well over into both the second and leftmost lanes - where do they even start? If the cop even happened to look up from their phone at the right time, they'd have to figure out which specific laws are being broken, how to cite them, what to take down as evidence, probably show up to the court date themselves, etc. So the actual hazardous moving violation goes unpoliced meanwhile every driver merely going the prevailing speed of the road has to spend a large part of their attention looking out for highway robbers laying in wait.

> Pulling over a citizen with a job and citing them for speeding is a much more lucrative use of their time

The solution may be in segregating the police from the traffic cops.

Policework is dangerous and specialised. Its officers need a lot of training and good pay. Traffic cops are basically humans trained to be cameras, inasmuchas 90% of what they do can be automated.

My understanding is that moving violations are perceived as high risk, low reward.

(1) The stop is dangerous because you don't know who the vehicle occupants are. If the driver is medium bad and runs, the public has low appetite for high speed pursuits that may cause collateral damage or put the public in danger. There's also the chance it's a very bad guy... someone in a stolen vehicle with a warrant out for a murder charge. Are they going to just give up and come quietly? Probably not.

(2) For a given region there is a list of things that the DA and/or judges are perceived as being soft on. There's little/no appetite from LEO to apprehend bad guy who is just going to be back out on the street a short time later.

So to the LEO, you want me to pull people over for speeding, but if it's a medium bad person they flee -> no pursuit allowed, and if it's a very bad person maybe they attack me? No thx, I'll wait for dispatch to call.

https://www.police1.com/traffic-patrol/articles/police-resea...

https://www.wcax.com/2022/01/13/prosecutor-takes-aim-chitten...

https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2021/06/stop-start-or-c...

They're also not doing that either. Something else is going on

https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/11nbnxw/san_f...

They realized that solving crimes pays just as well as playing candy crush, and the latter is less effort and more fun

Some public schools have played around with the idea of "performance-based" compensation, where teachers get paid more if they deliver better outcomes (unfortunately generally measured by standardized test scores) than would be expected on average, given the students coming in. This is mean to be about a 'value add', so teachers in schools with high socio-economic status students who were already going to score well don't get automatically paid more -- it's about an estimated 'improvement'.

I'm broadly aware that some health policy people want providers to be paid for caring for patients, not on a per-procedure basis. Get paid more for keeping your patients healthy and living longer, not for racking up more visits.

Does such a thing exist for policing? I think critically we need a mechanism for collecting crime stats that isn't fully dependent on the police themselves -- but at a high level, paying police to reduce actual crime, and shrinking their budget when crime actually increases, seems like a path to at least get what we pay for.

This is repeatedly brought up, but the same barrier is over $1500 in Texas[1]. Sooo..what is happening here? I am genuinely confused.

[1] https://www.reneaflores.com/criminal-defense/theft-crimes/mi...

> Why bother

Although to be fair, wasn't / isn't a lot of this "why bother" actually a political protest and retaliation against that DA and the citizenry that elected them? Not even doing something else with their time, but not doing much? And to be fair again, the joke in San Francisco is that "not doing anything" is a safer alternative for some of the population. Safer than "doing something else". This is messed up every which way.

One contributor is the fact that law enforcement rarely strikes but used their FOP and “union” organizations to slow, or sandbag work as a negotiation tactic. With membership that is largely unaccountable the blue wall is a political tool to leverage public funds by threat of crime and alternatively allowing or shutting down private unionization efforts.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-po...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapo...

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/06/police-unions-spend...

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/historic...

You are right about that, friend in Nevada county had his house broken into, guy stole some stuff including a rifle, drank one of his beers. Cops came dusted for prints, took the empty beer can. And nothing came of it.

Two years later gets a call from a detective they got the guy. He got arrested they took his DNA and it was a match for the DNA on the beer can. So they charged him for the break in and stealing the rifle.

Cops in the Bay Area would never even bother with that.

I can see how this would be the natural response to a situation where the DA refuses to prosecute crime. That said, simply giving in to lawlessness is clearly not the answer, and I doubt many cops find this to be a preferable path. It just validates the DA's backwards worldview! How are you going to replace them when the elections roll around, and they're able to argue "I'm not refusing to prosecute anyone! Just look, arrests are way down!" The only way to keep them honest is to continue doing the work and ensuring that the taxpayers have a clear understanding of what is happening.

> apprehending someone just for them to be released hours later

Should this not be the expectation for low-level/nonviolent offenses, under the presumption of innocence?

I've seen press about police departments making such an argument, and it seems really disingenuous. The implied claim is that if no charge will be pursued by the DA then there's "no outcome" or point in doing any police work or arrest.

However, when cops feel any kind of animus, it's really apparent that they can make life awful for people by harassing, intimidating, or assaulting who aren't doing anything illegal. They understand that even if the DA will never pursue anything, being a victim of over-policing is itself a shitty position to be in. Further, it can create the basis for claims of resisting arrest. For example, in my city there's press about a woman who was physically accosted by an officer for jaywalking. There's video of an officer doing a rapid U-turn after seeing a woman walk through a crosswalk, follow her down the street and slam her int a wall. The officer claims that the woman, who was just walking down the street with headphones, disregarded his (impossible?) instruction to show him an ID without reaching into her pockets or purse.

So we supposed to believe that cops have the energy to rough up random jaywalkers (who we're pretty sure the DA isn't interested in pursuing, and which is actually legal in my state now), but not enough to pursue people doing car break-ins, mail theft, vandalism, etc because of the DA's lack of interest?

If you were a mail thief, and not a priority for the local DA (... though isn't mail theft actually a federal crime?) but the police decided that you should be picked up and detained for 1-hour less than the window at which they're obliged to release you if no charges are forthcoming, and also all the stuff you stole, and some other stuff that you didn't steal, was confiscated and you didn't get your actual property back for an indeterminate period, you might understandably reconsider the pro/con list of stealing mail, even if you never went to court.

I think the explanation for why cops don't direct their harassment power at actual criminals is not that cops are rationally not doing work that won't lead to convictions. Rather:

- police budgets increase with the severity of the perceived "crime problem". Solving problems doesn't get you more money next year.

- priorities get set by political pressures. Mail theft, package theft, car break-ins, etc have diffuse harms over a broad set of the population but not necessarily against organized political blocks. But the X Neighborhood Merchants Association that donates to the campaign fund of the incumbent supervisor can probably organize to get more policing in their area.

- policing isn't about stopping or even responding to crime; it's about being seen projecting power. Report a theft in my neighborhood, and the cops will at best take a report that you can send to your insurer. If you have video footage of the crime, no one will look at it. The won't come to the location where the crime occurred. But routinely I will see 5 cops standing around talking, with 3 cop cars blocking traffic/bike lanes/lightrail tracks, while one cop is looming over/talking at a homeless person sitting on the sidewalk. There aren't enough cops to look into serial theft, but we need all hands on deck for this one disruptive unhoused person, b/c the world needs to see how we respond when you visibly step out of line.

https://missionlocal.org/2024/08/black-woman-injured-by-sfpd...

> USA easily has the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world

A fifth of our prisoners are there for drug crimes [1]. We also have more pretrial detention and longer sentencing than the rest of the world.

I can't find good data for arrest (versus incarceration) rates. But I'd suspect we're closer to the median in frequency of arrest. In other words, our problem isn't arresting too many people; it's holding them in jail for too long. (Also arresting people for non-violent drug possession, which is stupid.)

[1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html

The comparison to Finland and Norway is interesting. Have the police in Finland or Norway ever fire-bombed their own citizens?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing

The conditions of these situations may be more starkly different than you realise.

> Their solution to this high level of crime is yet more incarceration.

True, more incarceration doesn't seem to fix anything. However less incarceration also does not fix anything (see downtown San Francisco).

> Finland and Norway have a much lower rate of incarceration

Finland and Norway are effectively monocultures. They don't have the same social issues we do. Look at any 1st world monoculture and you see the same low incarceration rate. Japan, Korea, Iceland, etc.

You can't just abdicate the monopoly on violence because you feel you've done enough policing this year, any more than you can stop pumping water when you feel like people have used enough, or stop processing sewage and collecting trash when you feel like people have produced enough waste. That doesn't preclude working on root causes of crime or water conservation or reducing waste. But government has to deal with the population-level behavior that it actually has - all of it, not the amount it wishes it had - or we are fundamentally not living in civilization anymore. Water stops coming out of the taps, trash piles up in the streets, and people do crimes with impunity. The Northern European societies people lionize in these types of discussions are certainly not like that.

Behavior of small populations dont translate well into bigger one. Heck, even just to different society.

Swiss have direct vote on literally anything they gather 100k signatures for, ie joining Nato, EU, banning mosques, you name it. Yet the country runs like literal swiss watch. Give same freedom to British population and immediately you have brexit.

> If you want to lower crime, ask a Finn or Norwegian how they did it.

Has crime there ever been high? If not how can they tell you anything if they never had to do anything to "fix" it?

Or perhaps the difference is something else yet. The world is not just tuned by one slider on prison population.

America is made up of 5+ full fledged nations of people inside it with different ethnic, cultural, and genetic backgrounds. Why do you expect them to be anything like the Finns or Norwegians?

I can assure you I was never chanting ACAB

Its not one thing but a combination of factors.

- Police budgets getting slashed and police forces being reduced.

- Legislation like Prop47 (which made shoplifting of goods < $950 a misdemeanor).

- Progressive DA's refusing to prosecute low level crimes.

Individually all these changes aren't so bad and make sense on paper, but put them together in practice and it's a recipe for disaster. If you're a criminal thinking about robbing a store in SF for example, you know that:

1. The police likely won't show up so you likely won't get caught

2. Even if you do get caught, as long as you stole < $950, you get a slap on the wrist and the DA won't prosecute the crime.

Personally I think CA needs a "3 strikes" style law for low level petty crimes like shoplifting. The problem I keep hearing is that even if someone gets arrested for shoplifting, they are back out on the street the next day and there's no greater punishment for repeat offenders, so as a result you get a small group of people that do most of the crime and get arrested 50+ times per year with no consequence besides getting locked up for one night (at most).

It's ideology fueled by fabricated science. Things like drug and petty crime decriminalization have just completely failed at achieving their goals and these policies were backed by studies that have consistently failed to replicate.

The people behind these things are serious hard core ideologues. Remember Chesa Boudin? His parents were literal communist terrorists that murdered a cop while robbing a bank (when I say this I'm not misusing the term communist like many Americans do).

How does someone like that become a DA?

I feel like fucking with the Post Office is one of those things that sounds minor but can be a big fucking deal. Your petty theft just became a literal federal case, complete with a police force whose whole job is to protect the integrity of the mail.

> All it took was one irresponsible employee handing their keys to a 16 YO.

Sometimes not even. As a semi-related personal story, many years ago in university some friends and I set out to reverse-engineer the master keys.

All it took was buying 10x of the same blank from an online retailer for ~$12, cutting 6/7 positions to the same dephs of our dorm keys, then iterating the last remaining position down one depth at a time (starting from a 0-cut) in the last remaining position.

Rinse and repeat until we had iterated all 7 positions across our 7 sacrificial blanks, and with a little napkin math, we were left with the bitting for the TMK. Cut the TMK bitting onto a new blank, and we now had the literal keys to the kingdom.

Many harmless fun times were had, steam tunnels, roofs, and penthouses explored, but had we been actually malicious the potential for damage or theft would have been huge.

I think those with the skills and smarts to perform sophisticated attacks typically set their sights higher in life than petty burglary, with most actual burglars resorting to more simple means like brute-force and violence.

I'd be very surprised if these burglars picked locks on the mailboxes or duplicated postal keys instead of having found some dumb bypass born due to a simple oversight in the mailbox's design.

It depends on the setup.

Ideally, they're in a building and back-loaded, in which case, they might not even be closed on the backside. Because access to the back is secured.

But for other types of boxes, like outdoor boxes, there's usually another lock along the frame that causes the entire front (or back, depending) to swing open so the mail carrier can efficiently deliver to multiple boxes.

I know many apartment building mailboxes have a front key, but shouldn't PO Boxes at the post office be filled from the BACK?

Stealing things is illegal in every state - yes. However, stealing mail is a federal crime. There is a difference between stealing UPS package and stealing USPS package.

Thanks, should have read the article. I stand corrected.