That's debatable. Try going to law enforcement with anything non-trivial, and see how that goes. People routinely get murdered by someone that's a known and reported threat to them personally.

You might be shocked what the police are unable or unwilling to go after someone for. Things like aggravated assault, stalking, and breaking / entering. If you have a known address and whereabouts for someone, and you've checked there once (or a few times), what else can you really do? These tools can be used to automate things that would be extremely costly for an officer(s) to do.

I don't agree with pervasive surveillance btw, and there are other factors that cause law enforcement to be ineffective. I strongly disagree with your premise, though.

By "reasonably well" I don't mean "solves every crime." I mean well enough to keep society running smoothly, with affordable property insurance and the average person having low risk of violent injury or death.

There's a big difference between "solves every crime" and "is effective at solving crime". I think you're grossly overestimated what the police will do for you, if there isn't low hanging fruit, or some driving factor (someone "important" involved, multiple complaints, politics, ect.).

If there's single victim that hasn't died and the perpetrator isn't easy to find, they might just wait until they run into them or they murder someone. That's not an exaggeration, I've personally seen them unwilling to step in when a violent criminal is out to get someone, or someones being blatantly defrauded.

> I mean well enough to keep society running smoothly, with affordable property insurance and the average person having low risk of violent injury or death.

Well, that's a fairly heinous definition of law enforcement working well as it also covers, say, fascist secret police. Society running smoothly should not be prioritized over society running ethically. This is the core of why you could consider police primarily protecting the property rights of rich people: a disrupted rich person is enormously inefficient in terms of capital use, but a disrupted poor person is just another burden on society without much effect on the economic health signals to which people refer.

Mass surveillance is a favorite tool of secret police, most famously the Stasi of East Germany. If we want to avoid secret police, we should avoid mass surveillance, even if that means some criminals get away.

I agree, I just don't think you should be exaggerating the capabilities of the police.

I wonder if they actually did. It would be interesting to see a comparison of what percentage of petty crimes were caught in history compared to now.

Would it though? Didn't I just read an article pointed to by Hacker News about a woman in England, where they have millions of surveillance cameras, who's purse and laptop was stolen and it was pretty obvious who did it and where he went with it, and the police basically threw up their hands and said, "Well, nothing we can do about it!"? It seems as though they aren't targeting petty crimes with all this surveillance, so I'm not sure that what the comparison would show us would be meaningful.

The Black Panthers did the job reasonably well too.