A person's response to being burglarized is never purely rational. You've got the distress of the initial discovery, followed by the subsequent process of figuring out what (if anything) they stole, modified, or left behind, and the process of reporting the crime to authorities. Then you'll deal with self-blame about not investing more in home security and uncertainty about whether these thieves will come back for what they left behind (did they break in knowing you were gone, or did they mistakenly think you were home...?). Even if you had excellent video surveillance coverage that proved that they only took stuff you'd forgotten about, the burglar(s) violated your personal space, which obviously feels pretty awful, and may have broken something on their way in. The negativity of getting burglarized is irrational in nature and difficult to quantify in economic terms, but is nevertheless real.
In conclusion, I'd say every victim of B&E has great reasons to be upset, regardless of what (if anything) was stolen.
If you let criminals get away with breaking into someone's house and stealing things, it sends a message to other people that crime is allowed. Crime rates start to rise because no one is doing anything about it. People who were not criminals before are now comfortable being criminals because they know they won't be caught.
If you don't prosecute the small crimes, it often leads to bigger crimes.
He's pointing out that the 3% margin should exist evenly, so adding 1% theft on top means you'll hit 4%. So in order to pull of this stunt, they needed to make sure their margins were below 3%. But if you can get your margins below 3%, then why isn't that mandated?
This is forgiving people who break windows, but not people who carefully don't break windows so that they can then purposefully break windows as often as most people accidentally break windows
If my server logs say I had three errors today but everything is running fine, I'm probably going to let it slide. I have more important things to work on. If they say there have been 100 errors today, even if everything seems to be working fine I'm going to take the time to investigate and probably push a patch. Not that those 3 errors aren't important, but it's hardly worth my time to track down every error unless something is broken.
Either way it's interpreted, it's not a terribly insightful comment.
>deterrent so that it's not 4%?
My point is imprisoning someone to "send a message" rather than for the effect of the crime is cruel.
You're imprisoning criminals for the crimes they committed, not just to send a message. But imprisoning criminals for committing crimes does send a message and that message is that crime is not tolerated.
You might be okay with someone breaking into your house to steal your personal property without your permission but I'm going to guess you're not okay with someone breaking into your house and murdering your entire family. Would you then argue that it would be cruel to imprison the murderer? Because it would just be to "send a message" the murder is wrong?
No, of course not. They committed a crime, and that's what they're being punished for. Punishing criminals does not reduce the crime rate. It's the act of not punishing them that increases the crime rate.
Note that this comment does not remove the need for you to read the linked wiki article.
https://cebcp.org/evidence-based-policing/what-works-in-poli...
>recent systematic review by Braga, Welsh and Schnell (2015) found that policing strategies focused on disorder overall had a statistically significant, modest impact on reducing all types of crime. This positive effect was driven by the success of place-based, problem-oriented interventions. In contrast, there was no significant overall impact of aggressive order maintenance strategies. Thus, they conclude that police can successfully reduce disorder and non-disorder crime through disorder policing efforts, but the types of strategies matter.
That was entailed in me conceding that letting these people go free would probably bump the shrink to 4%.
Now your comment was
>If you let criminals get away with breaking into someone's house and stealing things, it sends a message to other people that crime is allowed.
To which I explicitly called back to by responding
>My point is imprisoning someone to "send a message" rather than for the effect of the crime is cruel.
So you're saying punitive damages (should) violate the 8th amendment? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punitive_damages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruel_and_unusual_punishment
Should you be upset if they raided good will safe too?
before someone accuses me of being a communist hippie I have a thought experiment for you: every 5 years I do spring cleaning by taking all of the boxes drawers etc of accumulated consumer goods junk I haven't looked inside of in the past 5 year and just take them to good will. I reason that if it hasn't been important in the last 5 years it never will be and that I would waste more time (money) looking closely. now the thought experiment: suppose someone had broken into my house over the last 5 years and stolen something from one of those receptacles that was eventually thrown out. should I be upset? now note that I'm not asking if I'm legally entitled to being upset but whether it would be rational to be upset.
but let me actually put on my hippie commie beatnik hat: there is so much money sloshing around in the economy and inefficiencies that entrepreneurs exploit to become wealthy. most of it is above board but some of it isn't and whether those people get punished or not is largely a function of whether they're caught before they're super successful or not. what is the difference here? these people saw an inefficiency and took advantage of it. to put a sort of hyberbolic point on it: why is this theft but selling toxic cdos not? in both "transactions" ultimately one party profited at the expense of the counterparty.
Edit: I love the downvotes. What exactly about my comment isn't "curious" as dang loves to exhort. God forbid someone questions the most totalitarian institution the human mind has ever conceived of: the law. HN is no different from every other pointless echo chamber that double speaks about freedom but suppresses dissenting opinions.