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Comment by ta1234567890 | Hacker News Reader

And here yet again an example of how the system is rigged against the poor and stacked in favor of the rich. If you have enough (and get stolen enough), then you get help, otherwise, too bad.

I understand that there’s a resources allocation problem here and the current solution is prioritizing bigger crimes. But given the resources of the victims, maybe the priorities should be inverted. Help the people that can’t pay for their own investigations, or just charge for the investigation services in proportion to the “size of the crime”.

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What you want is to maximize the utility of the police, but then the policy question is how do you define utility. The people in power will of course tend to define it with a bias towards them and theirs.

Perhaps the crime should be looked at in context. Stealing $100 from a homeless person is equivalent to stealing $1,000 from an averagely salaried person.

The police doesn't care about you, they want promotions like most people do. Solving cases with big values helps, imagine trying to get promoted by solving petty crimes.

I think its more a case of the public not being aware of this non-investigation habit and not pressuring enough. At the same time I understand, there are so many issues on the table its a wonder anything gets done at all. Priorities and all that.

Man, this shit is depressing to read as someone who just joined LE and sees mostly people who really want to help victims.

Better get used to it; the police receive a lot of flak, left and right. Sometimes warranted, sometimes not. The are also people in who's interest it is that the population distrusts the police. Crooks, obviously. But also conspiracy theorists, foreign agents, etc. The trick is to still listen to constructive criticism while listening and empathizing to negative criticism.

As you said, limited manpower, expertise, time, and budget are an issue for law enforcement. Not just for US law enforcement. For law enforcement world-wide.

Police departments in major American cities have bigger budgets than almost every other country's military.

Police officers earnings often rank in the top 1% of their communities.

Compare your city's police budget with their investments in communities and education and services - things that can actually make lives better and prevent the economic desperation that leads to crime.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and police are the very inefficient, violent cure.

Problem is, the truth of the matter varies a lot by country, region, city, precinct and by the people themselves.

There are police departments out there that are a valued contributor to the community, and there are some departments that seem to exist wholly to extract money and pain from the citizenry.

One bad apple spoils the bunch, unfortunately.

I think an order of magnitude (or three) increase in independent accountability of police across the board is the only way you'll see the trust start to rebuild, but certain organizations seem dead set against letting that ever happen.

You can argue in the opposite direction that stealing $1,000 should be prioritized because it gives more buying power to those criminal gangs and it finances more criminal activity than the $100.

Right, which is the current state of affairs. The problem is well known in OS scheduling. If you have jobs that are prioritized over others, and there is more work than workers as is the case with the police, you'll have lower-prioritized jobs that are NEVER executed.

I don't know how OSes solve these problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_scheduling

Round robin is one of the algorithms that may be employed by an OS to handle scheduling. The problem you're talking about is known as 'starvation'.

The frequent context switching is a source of inefficiency here- if you interrupt one job to switch to another, you've got to ditch everything in memory from job 1 and load a bunch of new data from disk for job 2. And then when you switch back to job 1- same deal. I'd imagine the same would apply, maybe even more so, for people

It should be a inverse U curve. If the amount is relatively inconsequential or occurs in super high frequency then it should be ignored. But if you lose more than 5 million then it's kind of on you

I'd estimate orgs with roughly 100k to 5 million in revenue it is mostly small players and assuming margins of 20% they are really only doing 20k to 1 million in profit/discretionary spending.

Add in a few factors like charity vs Inc, and it shouldn't be hard to narrow down who LE should assist.

Meanwhile the US oil pipeline gets hacked by a exposed password and the whole Federal Government comes in to fix the mess and agrees to spend more money.

Perhaps because that affects swaths of the population?

Well... the government couldn't even really fix anything besides catch the hackers. At the end of the day it was the limited scope of the attack and some preperation on the companies part that restored functionality as I understand it.

Alternitively, these industries are already heavily regulated including extensive safetly regulations - so perhaps a basic level of security practices should also be required. We regulated how high of a ladder an employee can climb without safety equipment but we don't really do anything if a company reuses passwords, runs known vulnerable software, etc. Occasionally there are fines after the fact but that is too late.

Not just allocation, it's a quality problem too. The type of cops you need for street busts is not the type of cops you need when pursuing interstate (or even international) wire fraud. If your organization is historically unbalanced towards the former, changing towards the latter will take generations (and a lot of political capital).

I don;t understand how this proves the system is rigged. Isn't the simple truth that jurisdictions are sacred and just because "somebody did something", doesn't mean that the other authorities are interested for a variety of reasons.

An NGO redeveloping an island and making 650k wires (ok, in three tranches) is not "poor" by any reasonable standard.

Exactly, so if they can’t get help, then what’s left for the rest?

It means only the top 5-10% are getting help. And probably most of them are not people but companies.

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