Why do you suppose this is?
What is happening there, that isn't happening in Baltimore?
Of course there is an amount of "putting thieves in jail" which will save you; once all the thieves are in jail, the remainder of the populace would mind their own business and walk past the gold bars.
If your thesis is that literally everyone would steal those gold bars, then I have to point out that this is a very pessimistic view, and that there are multiple different places around the world where it wouldn't happen.
Perhaps. I posit that you are going to run out of one of these things sooner than you are going to run out of thieves though: gold bars, patience of police to hunt down your stolen gold bars, places in prison.
You are going to run out of gold bars because if there is a stash of them unsecured there will be some thieves who either by sheer luck, or by being better at their job than the police at theirs will succesfully get away with stealing them.
You are going to run out of police patience by one of two ways: either immediately, once they hear that your unsecured gold bars were just laying in your front garden. In which case they take your report and chuck it in a drawer to forget about it. Or if you are politically well connected they will try to persuade you to secure them better. If you are literally their king and they can’t convince you to store the gold better they might try to protect it by posting a policeman next to it
And then finnaly if you have so much money that replenishing the stolen gold is not a problem, and you have so much political power that the police is not able to change your storage practices then that is when you are going to run out of space in your prisons.
> If your thesis is that literally everyone would steal those gold bars
Not at all. But it doesn’t need to be. My thesis is that there would be enough people who would try that it overwhelms your police force destined to throw thieves in prison.
In other places around the world those things are controlled by close-knit communities where being seen stealing would spread the word like wildfire and ruin the thief's reputation (or end up in a beating), not because people is purer and immune to sin or idiocy.
It's not pessimistic nor paranoid to lock your door. All it takes is one bad apple, even if it's one in a million.
This is such an incredible naive view of the world.
Whether or not crimes are committed is a complicated interplay of cost/benefit.
You say that the city is acting as if thieves are some force of nature. And to a certain extent they are. If it is easy enough to commit a crime and the reward is high enough a crime will be committed. As an example if you leave gold bars littered on your front yard people will pick them up. No amount of "putting thieves in jail" will save you.
Obviously increasing the chance of getting caught acts as a deterrent. But it is not cost free. Investigating and prosecuting car thieves cost hard money. If there are too many thieves of opportunity created by sub-par security arrangements the police/justice system becomes overwhelmed. The city can and should increase their police force of course, but at a certain point it is like trying to stop a tide with a rake. If you can prevent crime before it happens, for example by following sane and cost-efficient security practices that saves money and aggravation for everyone involved.
What prevents crime is multiple overlapping layers of our society engineered such that crime is maintained at a certain level. "putting thieves in jail" is just one of those layers. And if you think you can simply policeman yourself out of any situation then you haven't thought about the problem to a sufficient depth yet