05-31-2021, 09:40 PM
(05-31-2021, 08:12 PM)dtkvictim Wrote:(05-30-2021, 09:58 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: That is really unfortunate, I don't think the police consider much the impact thefts have on people.
I'm sure there are many factors, such as this one, that go into few stolen goods being returned. I suspect the biggest is probably that if the police put their entire resources into recovering stolen goods we'd probably still only see something like 10% of items returned. It's just a difficult task... I wonder how much it would cost to track down and return all stolen goods vs just paying to replace them. That would be forgoing justice, but I also think most police see sending petty theft to the courts as a further waste of money, because there is no "justice" to be had there anyways.
FWIW, my neighbour's apartment was burgled, and had some amount of their things tracked down and returned.
On the topic of bikes: I've never had one stolen because I have the golden strategy of never leaving it outside (locked or otherwise). It is a frustratingly limiting strategy though...
It is really eye opening how far away our perceptions of justice are from reality. Most people think the police spend time investigating and tracking down criminals. They just don't. I think that disconnect is partially responsible for the visceral response to calls to defund the police.
Of course, property theft is a big issue in our community. But if our community is like the average North American one, wage theft is at least an order of magnitude larger even by conservative estimates. And that REALLY open's one's eyes.
But like most things, police tracking down criminals after property is stolen is not the most effective strategies for crime prevention...the list of ways which even the police could proactively reduce bike theft is very long, and police based solutions aren't even close to the whole list.