This isn't so much a story about the limits of law enforcement as it is about the reality that they don't expend much time investigating "small" crimes and their definition of small is surprisingly large to the average person.
On the other crime types, for example drug related, law enforcement seems to pay a lot attention to the small-time criminals.
Why not? Seems like a waste of time and $. If they get the $50k or $650k back, they at least have a chance at civil forfeiture.
Drugs are right there in front of the cops most of the time.
The cost of prosecution could trivially run into thousands of dollars including public defenders the cost of incarceration 36k per year.
A 5 year stint could run the people almost 200k to punish someone for hurting themselves by hurting them worse.
There are only a finite number of people who commit crimes like this, and if you can find them at any point after they have committed one or more crimes, you ought to be able to arrest them.
It therefore doesn't really matter the size of the crime - it still enables an arrest of someone who might be involved in large numbers of crimes both big and small, but that you couldn't arrest before for lack of evidence they are involved in crime.
In many cases smaller crimes will be less well concealed too (hiding stuff costs money, paying more middlemen costs money, not worth it for smaller crimes)
It’s the latter. And not for nothing, but I don’t think that policy is working out so well for some businesses specifically in the Bay Area.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/organized-crime-drives-...
How much of that is because they won't allocate time for that but rather allocate time for a more profitable operation, like writing traffic citations?
Has there ever been a public accounting on what police departments spend their time on? My medium sized city spends about $500 million a year on police. That seems like a lot. It's the largest single expenditure.