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Comment by sago | Hacker News Reader

Any policing priorities set a precendent of expectation.

For example, because of the way car and property crime are (not) investigated, a petty car criminal can reasonably expect to get away with their crime.

There are plenty of other crimes where a police authority would choose not to take dramatic action and save a £10m cost of policing.

The suggestion isn't Assange be allowed to walk. If he were able to be affordably apprehended, then that is reasonable. The problem is that this spending is on policing theatre, aimed at making clear (primarily to the US) that the UK takes Assange seriously as a threat to security.

This kind of performance wouldn't be put on, at this expense, if a random alleged-rapist took shelter in an embassy. The police would leave them to it, and act when they had intelligence that they'd slipped out.

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> This kind of performance wouldn't be put on, at this expense, if a random alleged-rapist took shelter in an embassy. The police would leave them to it, and act when they had intelligence that they'd slipped out.

An embassy would never shelter a non-citizen unless the case was politically sensitive. Sheltering someone free on bail is particularly insulting to the UK's judicial system.

The UK would never just leave them to it and accept that kind of insult.

Minor car and property crime may not be investigated, but rape and sexual assault are taken seriously.

I've no idea what impact you think that makes on my point.

Rape may be 'taken seriously' incidentally (though actually you probably mean certain stereotypes of rape), but its conviction rate is still so low that, unfortunately, a rapist in the UK has a very high probability of getting away with their crime. The police certainly have improved in the professionalism with which they address rape, but rape prevention and womens charities in the UK still maintain that insufficient resources and effort is put into prosecuting rape cases to a conviction.

The conviction rate for rape is 58%, higher than that for other crimes at 57%, so rapists have less chance of getting away with their crime.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/7442785/Rape-co...

My apologies, I thought the context of discussing whether someone would get away with a crime they had committed or not (in the context of a conversation about whether crimes are even investigated) would make it clear I wasn't talking about conviction rate at trial.

You're right, if a rape case gets to court, the conviction rate is high. Using "conviction rate" in my comment was unnecessarily ambiguous, I apologise. But I wasn't referring to conviction rate at trial.

As you point out, conviction rate at trial is roughly the same over a broad range of offences. Which is mostly a consequence of the British system of Crown Prosecution. It bears little relationship to the ratio of reported crimes to convictions, nor the likelihood of a particular criminal getting away with an offence. Elsewhere I show Ministry of Justice figures for this broader sense of 'conviction rate' for burglary, which is under 5%.

Your last clause does not follow from the statistics you cite, obviously. And you still haven't addressed the issue of what impact your contention has on the point you responded to originally.

What evidence do you have that car and property crime aren't investigated, and in which country are you talking about?

Sorry that phrasing was overly terse. In many regions of the UK the police won't come out to petty car or property crime, let alone conduct an investigation. They will issue a crime number by telephone.

If the stolen goods are identifiable and turn up in some way, you may get some progress. Or similarly if the pattern of crime suggests it is worth their time trying to catch a prolific offender. Or if the crime is more severe than quotidian offences. But typically the crime number allows you to make your insurance claim, it gets logged in the police crime database, and that's all that happens.

My evidence is the experience of myself, friends and family.

I was surprised when they started an actual investigation when some idiot slashed my and my neighbors tires.

Apparently my neighbor heard the guy shouting "Fucking foreigner" (we both had foreign registration plates at the time) or something similar and reported it. Apparently, that moves the crime into the hate crime category and warrant extra police work. So even though I didn't report the slashing, the police came to my place to gather my version.

Overall same result though and I wasn't really expecting any result to be fair.

Yes, as I understand it, police authorities allocate resources for categories of crime based on national and local policing priorities.

If your low-priority crime (like criminal damage) can somehow be placed in a higher priority category (like hate-crime), the police will find it much easier to allocate resources to it, and you will see a more spirited investigation.

My original point was merely to say that there are such things as low-priorities for which the police don't put much effort, and by doing so they set a precedence for what crimes one could reasonably expect to get away with.

I can say from my experience that in the UK property and car crime is seldom investigated. Police just issue a crime number for insurance.

And I can counter it by saying that, in the UK, I'm aware of cases in which property theft has been followed up by an investigation in which the perpetrators were caught. The original comment insinuated that we're living in some kind of free-for-all anarchy where you can get away with petty theft without any consequences, which is certainly not the case. (You can get away with non-petty theft without any consequences, but that's a whole other issue ...)

If the original comment refers to me, then that wasn't my intent to insinuate that at all.

The published data shows that only a tiny minority of petty crimes end in conviction, however. In my experience (5 times, including family and close friends), the police chose not to send an officer to the scene.

I'm sure some petty crimes get solved, and some serious crimes don't. But if you thought I was making either point, may I respectfully suggest you reread my comment.

Fair enough, the investigation rate is obviously at neither extreme, and I'd still argue that "reasonably expect to get away with" is pretty loaded, but if you mean there's a greater > 50% chance then, sure, I can believe that!

According to the official Ministry of Justice figures, there were 745,000 reported burglaries in the UK in 2013 (last figures I could find), and there were 26,300 convictions for burglary. Although the rates fluctuate, they don't change by orders of magnitude, so a steady state assumption isn't accurate, but is near enough for ballpark figures.

So on that basis, the likelihood is > 95% that you'll get away with it.

And note that those statistics are for all burglary, including aggravated burglary. I can't tell from the data, but I'd suggest it is reasonable to assume that petty burglary has a lower conviction rate still.

I'm not saying it never gets investigated... Just all four times I have reported a crime, nothing happened after getting the crime number.

From the article: UK police watchdog: burglary and car crime "on verge of being decriminalised."

I've had two motorcycles stolen in the UK. The police gave me a crime reference number and sent out a victim support letter; that was the sum total of their apparent effort.

Well, presumably they'll also have placed the VIN (or equivalent) on their watchlist. But aside from that – what do you expect to happen in the case of a crime like that?

Something tells me that if it were the chief of Police's motorcycle stolen, the bobbies might be a bit more energetic in recovering it. Probably what the GP expects is some subset of what they would do for the chief.

Come and look for evidence? Finger or shoe prints? Check if there are CCTV cameras that might have been covering the area? Interview neighbours and see if they saw anything? Confirm if you did actually have these motorcycles and that this isn't an insurance scam? Advise you on how to better secure them in the future?

Same thing happens in the US. Called in a smash and grab on my car and was told that it happens all the time and that they don't come out or even take a report over the phone unless something was left in the car (rock or brick or tool used to smash the windows). Go fill out a form on the website. The crimes are on their radar, but investigating them individually would be hopeless.

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