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Comment by baroffoos | Hacker News Reader

No, the law does not and should not use maximum resources for everyone. It is clearly beneficial to not send whole teams of people looking for weeks for your stolen wallet like they would for a missing person.

>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.

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Personally, I would vastly prefer cops focused on minor property crimes. That’s not to say the need a statewide manhunt, but something approaching 1:1 of property damage vs police respond quickly adds up to several hours of investigation.

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.

> People will do 500$ worth of damage to make 30$

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.

> It is clearly beneficial to not send whole teams of people looking for weeks for your stolen wallet like they would for a missing person.

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.

> but the criminals who make a living stealing them do hundreds per month and thousands per year.

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.

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