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Comment by ihsw | Hacker News Reader

Did it reduce catalytic converter theft?

I doubt it helped much directly. The nationwide ring that was dismantled recently was busted partially due to surveillance from a pole mounted camera though. The article title initially baited my rage, but I can plausibly see how LPRC's could be used to track catalytic converter thieves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932022_catalytic_co...

(a pole mounted camera for which a warrant had been obtained...)

As it should be.

Jeez, in not normally cynical but the Japanese buyer faced no charges and this has bad optics:

> Janice Ayala joined Dowa Metals & Mining America as their Chief Compliance Officer on March 3, 2023. During Ayala's 27-year tenure at the Department of Homeland Security, her most recent role before joining Dowa was as Director of Joint Task Force – Investigations. This agency oversaw the investigation into both DG Auto Parts and Dowa.

This angle never gets attention in the debate over to kill in theft cases.

To quote from https://www.txdmv.gov/sites/default/files/body-files/MVCPA_F...

Number of times an ALPR was deployed. 61,875

Number of LPR Deployments by taskforce investigators 42,878

Number of vehicles recovered from LPR detection 1,963

Number of Cleared Cases – Catalytic Converter Theft 1,658

Number of arrests from LPR detection 569

Number of identified/documented prolific catalytic converter theft offenders 266

Number of Catalytic Converter Theft bait operations 236

The problem is they don't define "deployments". There are ~13,500 ALPR cameras and they do thousands of plates per hour and neither of those numbers matches the deployment. My best guess is it is a targeted search and so a vehicle is recovered or a case is cleared 2-3 times out of every 100 times they search the database.

Regarding actual reduction, as another comment said, the amount of crime fluctuates with metal prices, pretty much lockstep. But at least they can lock the people away.

It’s hard to say. As the economic got better, trade policies stabilized and the price of commodities and therefore the metals in a converter dropped in value. As the price of the metals went down, the thefts dropped nationally. Texas thefts seemed to have dropped inline with the national trend. Since the supply side issues are picking up again, the thefts are going up likewise.

If what you say is true it doesn’t sound hard to say at all, it seems clear that the cameras didn’t reduce the thefts at all.

Doesn't seem especially likely, does it? People report the thefts in unmonitored neighborhoods. The police... check the nearby intersection cameras for any vehicles passing between 11pm and 4am?

As much as I think the tech needs to be regulated to prevent abuse, if I was a driver in San Francisco I’d try to only ever park my car directly in view of a flock camera.

I was a construction superintendent a couple of decades ago and had a rented backhoe stolen overnight after I had parked it directly under cameras.

This was in Sunland Park, New Mexico which is basically Eastern El Paso.

The police weren't interested in getting camera footage at all. They also weren't very interested in following the backhoe tracks through the sand that went through a backyard gate at this trailer house a few hundred feet away containing cerement mixers, junk, and dozens of bicycles in different states of repair.

I came back to that job a few months later to check on some things and there was another backhoe parked in that backyard yard. I called the police. They said "what crime are you reporting? stop calling if you don't have a crime".

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