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Comment by pvarangot | Hacker News Reader

I would only do this if you either know the police will help retrieve your car if you have the location, or if you are ready to engage the robbers yourself. Otherwise it's useless to know where it is.

I have experience trying to get the cops to help in Oakland and San Jose and they really didn't want to.

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A lot of the cellular gps trackers have ignition kill capability, where you can send it a specific sms message and it’ll pull a wire to ground or open circuit a pair of wires, which you can use to remotely kill the engine.

A friend of mine got a motorcycle back by watching its movements via the gps tracking, and killing the engine while the guy was riding in a safe-ish and high visibility place, so the thief just parked it and walked away.

I imagine (not a lawyer) that this expose you to a variety of charges.

IANAL, but I think in California as long as you don't use excessive force it's ok, but yeah if you kill the engine at a high speed or if you get unlucky and the thief gets seriously injured then you will get in trouble if they want to go after you.

Who's gonna sue him? The car thief?

Potentially, or more likely the public prosecutor after the coroner's report comes in.

This is ridiculous. Wtf are cops good for, then?

Cracking heads. The rest is just PR.

They don't work for you. They know they don't work for you.

Tbf oakland is a low bar (as well as sf). Here just 15 mi down the road they investigated and arrested a credit card thief who stole my wife’s card and I didn’t even ask for it. They also regularly capture cat converter thieves with sting operations. Overall I’ve been quite impressed with San Mateo PD

We were also surprised by the Oakland thing, as I know they helped with petty crime where the damage was less than a full blown stolen car. It was not a very shady area and it was in their jurisdiction. I heard it's not that uncommon, and a SFPD officer told us that it's probably because we said the robbers where armed and they just don't get involved with that.

The car got recovered by an asset management crew though and it went smoothly AFAIK.

I second this. I even had a local Bay Area PD help me recover a stolen bike after finding it posted.

From European experience: dealing with violent crime and writing reports for insurance claims for others.

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