Hacker News Reader

Comment by yalogin | Hacker News Reader

So a car is not considered personal property if it’s parked on the street? I thought me taking someone else’s property is illegal, isn’t it? Say I swiped your wallet, it’s obviously not locked in your pocket and you are on the street next to your car. Will I be prosecuted or not?

View on HN

The arrest rate for car breakin in SF is 2%, let alone prosecution. What’s your suggestion for raising that rate—hire a cop for every car in the city?

This is precisely the sort of policy that drives development and acceptance of mass surveillance software. What exactly do you think a city of technologists is going to do when driven against a wall, stuck between trying to appear progressive and chronic material loss of personal property?

It just takes one wrong middle manager to have a bad day and their car broken into before a certain cloud computing company decides that their smart surveillance doorbells can easily be adapted as car cams.

The police don't arrest people when they know the DA is going to drop the charges immediately and their superiors are going to ask why they are wasting their time.

This is entirely driven by the political atmosphere there where the DA would rather "its not really a crime" narrative than to prosecute and possibly face criticism from the progressive populace.

I don’t see anyone “progressive” arguing for not prosecuting people who break into cars, or not looking for them, or deprioritizing them. This is hardly a polarizing viewpoint. It’s just a useful dog whistle for certain styles of law and order conservatism.

There IS a progressive effort to prioritize moving forward with felony charges over misdemeanors. Perhaps you got confused?

There are people in this very thread arguing that they shouldn't be held accountable because of income inequality. The DA not prosecuting those people is entirely political that is driven by what the population of SF wants. So there obviously is a movement not to prosecute those people.

> It’s just a useful dog whistle for certain styles of law and order conservatism.

Oh yes, enforcing the law against property destruction and theft is definitely a dog whistle... O_o

The SF police don't even try. They could be using bait cars, responding to calls of broken glass, etc. They won't catch all of the thieves, but the habitual ones would eventually get unlucky. Right now, the police don't bother, because the DA doesn't prosecute misdemeanors. Now there's a brand new DA that seems like he'll do even less.

Ultimately if it's known that breaking into a car is something that has a reasonable chance of a big punishment, it will happen less.

You should run for DA.

Also, you can break a window from across the street with a ball bearing. Good luck.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com