I used to lock my car door. Then they cut open my soft top and slipped inside to steal my $4 in coins and a USB charger. My good driving record has my deductable to $0 - thank gosh - it was a $4k+ repair.

Now I just leave nothing of value inside the vehicle - even removed my glovebox (another thief ruined the locking mechanism trying to get it out).

I guess this is just a mystifying perspective to me. Car theft is impossible to entirely eradicate, I try to avoid showing valuables too, but I'd never live in an area where I expected my car to be broken into unless I had no other options. Maybe it's fine if other people are honestly okay with it?

> I'd never live in an area where I expected my car to be broken into unless I had no other options

I live in a very nice area of DC, cars would get rifled through every ~2 months or so, very late at night and they would move very quickly. Many people have decided that it is worth their while to live there despite this minor inconvenience. If you don't want to live there, that's fine - but please don't vote for people who are going to institute stop & frisk and heavy policing of poor neighborhoods. Those policies don't even work to stop it - the cause is large wealth disparity in a small geographic region.

You may have the choice to live in a certain area, many do not have the choice to live in areas where they are subject to demeaning patdowns and stops.

Sure, that makes sense to me. I will certainly avoid moving to cities where people are okay with crimes, so I won't have an opportunity to vote in their elections.

> avoid moving to cities where people are okay with crimes

Pretty much every city is moving to less aggressive policing of petty crime largely because of its pretty blatant failure and the substantial negative impacts it has. Generally sounds like you'll probably want to stay in suburbia.

> I live in a very nice area of DC, cars would get rifled through every ~2 months or so

> Generally sounds like you'll probably want to stay in suburbia.

It rather sounds like you have a strange perspective on urban living. I can't speak for the US, but it isn't normal in any city in Europe for your car to be rifled through every 2 months in a nice area of a city. It isn't even normal for bad areas of cities. If it happens once in a person's life it would be bad luck.

> I can't speak for the US, but it isn't normal in any city in Europe for your car to be rifled through every 2 months in a nice area of a city.

I don't know how you have knowledge of the normal number of car break ins in every neighborhood of every city in Europe, but yes car breakins are not infrequent in the urban US. Ours was probably particularly frequent because it was being targeted by some sort of organized setup, but it is not uncommon.

It's a function of the amount of inequity - Europe is generally has somewhat less wealth inequity in the United States and less generational poverty.

> car breakins are not infrequent in the urban US. Ours was probably particularly frequent because it was being targeted by some sort of organized setup, but it is not uncommon.

> Generally sounds like you'll probably want to stay in suburbia.

So the poster you replied to was correct to say that they can just move to cities where it isn't accepted that cars are frequently broken into. They don't have to stay safe in suburbia after all.

It is still quite frequent, if not as frequent as I experienced it (still, incidence is quite high in the Bay for instance). I don't really feel like mustering the mental energy to argue with what are ultimately pretty nit-picky objections.

In sum, car breaks in happen, policing it generally doesn't work very well, stop & frisk is bad, don't vote for people who do it, thank you for coming to my ted talk.

> cars would get rifled through every ~2 months or so

As a Brazilian, wow, that's a high crime area. People here voted a crazy wannabe dictator into the presidency because he promised to fix places that were less bad than this.

Anyway, yes, random stop & frisk probably makes things worse, not better.

> that's a high crime area

Brazil's homicide rate is like 7x the United States, I find it hard to believe that the occasional opening of a door and looking through your car would be high crime by Brazilian standards where people will literally get stopped by armed gangs and kidnapped out of their car.

There were no murders where I lived, no muggings, no particularly violent crime of any kind - just some people would drive up to the rich neighborhoods at like 2:30 am and go through some cars.

I grew up in an okay neighborhood abutting a bad neighborhood (in the 80s and 90s the sounds of automatic gunfire were noteworthy but all too common). We didn't lock our doors (car or house) and 30 years bygone, somebody's car finally got broken into a couple of years ago.

The going logic is that the gang violence was isolated to their turf, and the property crime happened in the rich neighborhood on the other side of the housing projects. So there's sweet spots out there.

> We didn't lock our doors (car or house) and 30 years bygone, somebody's car finally got broken into a couple of years ago.

How would you know if your car got broken into if your doors were unlocked? What city was this (one of Baltimore, DC, Oakland, Chicago, NYC?)?

YMMV but it's not like car break-ins are rare.

This was in the south end of Seattle. People don't break into cars willy nilly, they steal shit. My brother's car recently got broken into (he's a broke musician but lives in a more affluent neighborhood) and they took everything not nailed down, including a ratty pair of shoes and the pad he used to track his gas mileage.

Fans are terrible this days, but tomorrow this shoes could worth millions so, just in case... better safe than sorry.

> don't lock your doors

Will this affect your insurance if the car is stolen?

> Will this affect your insurance if the car is stolen?

Do car thefts of this form even really happen anymore? How would they even prove the doors were unlocked?

When my car was stolen, my insurer asked whether I had locked the doors and enabled the security system. I assume this is standard procedure.

I am not sure whether a negative answer would have affected my claim.

I suspect it would have. I believe insurance plans can have exclusions for things like this. Not all that unreasonable - to consider the extreme case, would you want to insure someone who never uses their locks?

> Don't leave valuables in your car, don't lock your doors - they'll just open, rifle through, and leave. I've had my car rifled through tens of times and the most they ever got was some quarters I left in there.

Not sure how much of an issue this still is, but thieves used to steal airbags. That's a lot more expensive and a PITA to replace.

Based on a quick google, you have about a ~0.01% chance of your airbag being stolen in a given year. How many black people should we stop and frisk to solve that problem, I'm a little rusty on the math?

Just because the original policing tactic that spawned this thread is abhorrent doesn't mean we can't discuss other possibilities here.

More on-foot friendly patrols (which should be perfectly doable given much higher density in cities), for example. Or maybe police actually trying to catch actual criminals instead of just acting like insurance agents.

Here's what happens: Voters vote for someone who says they will do this thing "more on-foot friendly patrols", "catch actual criminals". Police obviously continue what they've always been doing and stop & frisk, harass minorities, etc, because that's generally what happens when you stuff poor neighborhoods full of cops from a completely different background to the community they are policing. Everyone pretends this is not what is happening until some particularly blatant instance brings it to light.

Turning up the pressure to catch stupid, small crimes while letting actual large problems (like consistent theft of wages that outnumbers money lost to robbery 3 to 1) will lead to stupid solutions.

Okay, so voting like that won't lead to friendly patrols. That doesn't mean friendly patrols are a bad idea.

> friendly patrols are a bad idea.

Absolutely and I think there are models of policing that reduce petty crime and obviously people would rather have less petty crime than more. We are all in agreement here.

I just want people to be aware that the policing of their imagination is not always the policing of reality and oftentimes what your gut instinct tells you might work will have pretty large and distorted negative impacts.

I really do think we're all on the same side here. Nobody likes crime and nobody likes police excess. The problem is just that sometimes where we grew up and what experiences we've had can lead us to underestimate one impact and overestimate another.