I respect the law, and the lawmakers should work for me. The ROI calculations are to be budgeted and accounted for, otherwise why am I being taxed?

I understand the goal of this sentiment, but this is not how most societies work. Equality under the law is the proper ideal, but it's not at all how things work. There are a lot of reasons for that, from bias to lack of resources. But whatever the particular reason may be, most people only notice and complain about inequality when they are its losing side.

Make no mistake about it though, from the police at the bottom of the stack, all the way up to how the judges rule on cases at the top of the stack, the legal system has never been equitable.

In fact, most of the time, there's very little alignment, because there's no incentive to have those things be aligned. Sometimes even disincentive: there are laws on the books nobody wants enforced, and a culture in policing of enforcing the letter of the law, not the spirit—but one can always choose to not enforce a law one doesn't agree with by just making an informal agreement that certain crimes (of basically equal severity) take enforcement priority, such that those crimes nobody sees as crimes just get "de-prioritized" to the point that they're never enforced at all.

>The ROI calculations are to be budgeted and accounted for Often this would require you to pay more in tax than the value you would get back from it. Are you ok paying $1000 to track down the person who smashed your window when you will likely never get any money from them or will you just pay the $100 it costs to get a new window which doesn't happen very often.

Generally, a tiny fraction of the population commits the vast majority of such crimes. People will do 500$ worth of damage to make 30$, work out what it takes to make useful amounts of money and these people end up destroying a lot of property. So, the ROI calculation needs to account for windows not smashed.

A good example is copper wire thieves. They pull up to a house and access the electrical panel in the garage which they turn off. Using a winch, they pull out all the copper wire in the house that's directly connected to the box (there's also many branch lines left behind). They then sell the wire as scrap for $20 or so and presumably use the money to buy drugs.

Fixing this damage can run $30,000 to $100,000. The whole house can have to be torn apart from the inside to reinstall all the electrical.

A massive miscalculation -- stolen wallets, cell phones etc are individually small-ticket items, but the criminals who make a living stealing them do hundreds per month and thousands per year. Taking the perpetrator of a thousand muggings or pickpocketings off the street is a job worth doing, possibly more so than chasing small time drug dealers or runaway teens.

You got a source for that claim? At least in the US, it’s significantly higher than any number I’ve ever read in a study / report.

Punishing an already poor and marginalized person is counterproductive to that goal, so we try to avoid it as much as possible. And that's probably who you're going to find on the other end of a car break in. So why bother looking?

"How much justice can you afford?"

It's often that crimes restore lost order and stability for some people. Not saying it's moral on one side or the other, but it certainly doesn't feel like a neat little package.

Why does SF have a sizable increase in property crimes over the past 10 years but a drop in violent crimes? I'd imagine if chaos did truly beget chaos, then rates of crime across the board would be going up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

It's one of many reasons I moved away from there and do not entertain any job offers from that region, regardless of how much they are offering. At a certain point one needs to write off these cities. That or accept being a victim with no legal recourse knowing your car's going to be vandalized damaged and stolen on a regular basis and you are going to be hassled by guys with guns when walking down the street.

So judging by off the napkin math on costs and optimistically assuming stronger enforcement would lead to 50% less car break ins, if strong enforcement costs more than $15 million is it worth it? When does the cost of enforcement become inconsequential to the results? A good question to debate on either side IMO.

That's not really the point, though. It's not just a simple monetary calculation. Even if the true value of repairs and stolen items was $30M, I would allocate several times that of taxpayer money just for the quality of life benefits, assuming it would do some good.

Spending more on the crimes with negative ROI, makes the total ROI higher because it acts as a deterrent for future would-be criminals.

Reddit was full of video of really trashy kids, driving their bicycles through malls and stores harrassing random people there, and "nobody could do anything" about them. If those kids were arrasted, sent to juvie, given community service (or maybe even just shown on tv crying in court, instead of acting all badass on their bikes), that would sure stop many others from repeating what they did.

Of course all of this feels gross, but as someone who was homeless in SF for a bit, going after people on the outs feels really backward.

"We can only give them a citation, and the thieves know that, so they don't care," said officer Pete McLaughlin (retired) to me.

Admittedly, this was in regards to stealing bikes and not into breaking cars, but I suspect the punishment is the same.

Surveillance still is one of the most uncreative and probably also one of the worst forms of crime prevention/reduction.

We don't need draconian surveillance measures enacted to solve this type of crime. We need police resources to actually follow up and prosecute petty theft for all victims, not just corporations and celebrities. A couple of years ago my father was involved in a hit and run when a man in a red late model corvette turned out of a small subdivision right in front of traffic. This was during morning rush hour on a weekday, there's only about a dozen houses on that road, and only one red late model corvette parked in the driveway of one of those houses. That single red corvette was also parked with a car cover on it afterwards. Even though there were numerous witnesses to the hit and run given that it was during morning rush hour traffic, and even though it is pretty obvious what happened and there are plenty of ways to get evidence to support it, the police couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. As far as I know, they didn't even so much as question him about the hit and run.

We're currently paying the privacy tax with existing surveillance yet people like you and me cannot benefit from that surveillance.

I've had three home break in and robberies. In no case would the police even show up to take a report. In the case where my cameras identified the perps and I tracked down and documented them trying to fence my property, and worked with other neighbors to document an actual crime syndicate that was taking orders for specific things to steal, the police would do absolutely nothing. Police are about collecting fees from "in" drug dealers in return for looking the other way, while protecting their turf against incursion from rival drug gangs. They are also involved, along with judges in the USA, with child sex trafficking. The idea we need to give up freedom and be surveilled by these people is unrealistic.