It's hard to compare the serial bombings in your link to the Dagoberto ones. The Austin ones all seem to be attempted murders, not extortion of large companies. I suppose that could mean the Austin bomber should actually be more likely to be killed by police. But, another big difference is that the Austin bomber wasn't humiliating the police the way Dagobert was.
Hard to speculate how it would go down, but I doubt the police would blast down a high profile suspect. The higher your profile, the more professional and high ranking your adversaries are going to be.
After a while we lost our optimism about the penitentiary concept and decided that being locked up was just a pointless ordeal, which made it popular with people who believe the goals of criminal sentencing should be punishment, deterrence, and keeping dangerous people separated from society, and less popular with those who favor a benevolent approach.
There are certainly other factors, like the presence of a large group of “othered” people with less opportunity, but there is no doubt a vengeance streak running through the American conversation on criminal punishment.
> According to official ballot materials promoting the original Three Strikes law, the sentencing scheme was intended to “keep murderers, rapists, and child molesters behind bars, where they belong.” However, today, more than half of inmates sentenced under the law are serving sentences for nonviolent crimes.
https://law.stanford.edu/three-strikes-project/three-strikes...
Despite the high incarceration rate, the US is ranked third in the OECD for homicide, fourth in rape, eighth in robbery, sixteenth in assault, thirteenth in burglary and tenth in vehicle theft in the OECD. The US generally also jails people longer than most other countries; the ratio of people in prison to people who get convicted per year is much higher than in other countries, and those weren't the first "tough-on-crime" laws by any means.
And so for the highest imprisonment rate in the world, amongst the OECD the United States is still amongst the top half of the 32 OECD countries for every category of violent crime. It's not like these are short-term effects either, we've been jailing people under three-strikes for a generation going on two. It's pretty clear evidence that a high rate of imprisonment is not actually reducing crime.
https://www.civitas.org.uk/content/files/crime_stats_oecdjan...
The amount of corruption, sheriffs getting to pocket the money for prison food, judges getting kickbacks for convictions, guaranteed prison quotas, exceptions from slavery laws, etc. don't help either.
IME the excuses made for it and cherry picking from it have only reinforced bad habits. Stuff like appeal to authority, survivorship bias, and trusting intuition over data.
Cheap labour. The 13 amendment of the U.S. constitution prohibits slavery, except as a punishment from crime.
Prison labour is a multi-billion dollar industry.
On the other hand, if he did the cash drops with Bitcoin instead, it would be much harder to catch him -- but there wouldn't be any Gyro Gearloose devices, so we'd never heard about it either.
Any kind of private person or company cannot install cameras looking into public spaces at all (and yes, that includes Ring doorbells that can see the street or even just part of the sidewalk). While many of those illegal uses might fly under the radar the general ban of those uses also means that they are relatively rare and not something just anyone would do.
Public institutions can install cameras seeing public spaces but they are limited by law (there needs to be a valid obvious reason for the camera to be there and the use needs to be proportionate), so blanket complete coverage of public spaces is just not happening (yeah, public institutions can probably find a bullshit excuse for any place but the culture these laws create mean that cameras are just used a lot less). Cameras in general are where you would expect them to be (e.g. around high profile government buildings), not in some random street somewhere.
Actually, the most recent episode of "Aktenzeichen XY ... ungelöst"[0] (a German TV show that is basically the same as "Crimewatch" or "America's Most Wanted", but predating both of them) mentioned such a case [1].
Some guy in Berlin sent bombs via mail back in 2017/2018 and demanded a ransom paid in Bitcoin. They didn't explain the details, but apparently police did trace a transaction to that wallet back to some Bitcoin vending machine and got a nice picture from there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktenzeichen_XY_…_ungelöst
[1] https://wikixy.de/Sendung_vom_12.05.2021#Die_Studiof.C3.A4ll...
> ...
> ...motion detector squealed. When the officers opened the box, they found a gaping hole...
That line immediately had me thinking of the movie "Speed", but funny enough, this story actually pre-dates the movie by roughly 2 years. But it does make me wonder if they had the same source of inspiration.
"Inside was a note ordering them to stuff two freezer bags with money and deposit them in a grit box—a kind of bin filled with sand for de-icing roads—in Britz, a section of Berlin...At 11:07 P.M., though no one had come to the box, the motion detector squealed. When the officers opened the box, they found a gaping hole that fell deep into the sewers below. Funke had built an exact replica of a city grit box and placed it over a manhole cover, then opened the cover to retrieve the package."
Reading the article, I can't help thinking what a different era it's from. The guy extorted money from department stores with bombs for years, engaged in all kinds of Pink Panther shenanigans, and when he was finally caught he got 9 years, a work release, and the career in cartooning he'd always wanted. Nowadays in the US he'd probably be shot dead within a month, or barring that end up locked away for life. There's very little sense of proportionality left in the justice system these days for those who wrong the rich.