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Comment by wat10000 | Hacker News Reader

When it comes to small-scale crime like this, the smartest thing is typically not to do it at all. So the people who do it will generally not be very smart.

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In this day and age who robs homes any more? You'd be liable to get paid to take a bunch of junk away instead

When BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) came to Pleasanton CA my fox-news brainwashed racist aunt and uncle and their neighbors where legitimately convinced black people from Oakland were going to come take BART out from Oakland and steal their TVs. And this was back in the day of the giant bulky heavy-backed rear-projection TVs. I was like... first of all they drive cars now and second of all who is going to take BART to come rob you and third of all who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing!! And if they were going to take your 150lb TV they would need a truck and a dolly, not take public transit to do so.

Pleasanton remained safe and bland despite allowing evil public transit.

> who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing

BART service started in Pleasanton in 1997. In 1992 or 1993 I had a glass CRT TV stolen during a burglary at our house in exurban Connecticut. There's no reason to claim that TV theft is some myth. It was a crime that did in fact happen.

Ummm... Something tells me they didn't take the train to come steal your TV.

the did not, no. That's why I did not address that part of the comment, only the part claiming that no miscreant would want to carry a heavy TV.

The spirit of my comment is that they wouldn't take public transit to come steal TVs because nobody would intentionally schlep a giant stolen tv via public transit, they most likely would use cars.

yeah it turns out everyone else read the end of that sentence one way and I went the other. Although the image of a train car full of straphanger burglars with a tube TV between their legs, reading a newspaper folded into 1/8ths with their free hands is kind of funny.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46304608

Did the thief take transit, though? We had a similar NIMBY argument in the area where some totally-not-racist people said thieves were going to bike from a predominantly black neighborhood 15 miles away to steal TVs, and it was so blatantly wrong that the local chief of police noted that the burglars they catch use stolen trucks or SUVs for the cargo capacity.

I only addressed "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing" because that's the only part of the comment I objected to. By now it seems like everyone is reading it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing for the duration of a light rail ride" whereas I read it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing at all" and I'm the odd one out.

The little but wealthy town of Los Altos Hills next to Palo Alto had Flock come in and install their camera surveillance after a string of burglaries and one or two home invasion style robberies, it's a mostly rural/suburban area. Believe it or not there are also still folks who come from cultures where they do not believe in banks in the USA, so there is a lot of cash and gold in those people's homes.

> small-scale crime like this

You mean murder?

Indeed, 8:30p is no different from 2p or 10a for the act.

It's most likely a matter of happenstance. It happened to be the warmest time of the day (even though it was evening). Maybe the thinking was someone was home to help them find the valuables, maybe not.

> 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery.

The assertion that there is some optimization for some specific imagined motivation, is literal fantasy.

Fewer crimes are committed when the weather is bad since criminals avoid going out like everyone else.

It's a fantasy that strongly correlates with facts. Home robberies are not evenly committed throughout the day.

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