Baltimore sues Hyundai, Kia over spike in car thefts
thebaltimorebanner.com
thebaltimorebanner.com
Baltimore’s lawsuit says the companies “failed to keep up with industry standards,” and claim it was a result of business decisions made to reduce costs and boost profits “notwithstanding decades of academic literature and research supporting the deterrent effects” of anti-theft technology.
“The dramatically increased rate of Hyundai and Kia theft in Baltimore has required city and police resources that would not have been needed but for Hyundai and Kia’s deliberate failures,” the lawsuit says. “Car thieves — many of them teenagers— take advantage of these failures and engage in reckless driving, creating substantial safety risks to themselves and Baltimore residents and their property.”
Someone figured out that you could open a Kryptonite lock using a Bic pen, which has roughly the same shape as a tubular lock key. You did not need to use the actual key or pick the lock. There was a rash of bike thefts afterwards.
TikTok is a convenient scapegoat, but I think the problem would exist without TikTok, because it so closely echoes a similar situation from 2004. To be honest, I think that the manufacturer should bear the blame in both scenarios—it’s their responsibility to make sure that the products can withstand, for at least a few minutes, an unskilled thief with inconspicuous, unpowered, commonly available tools (like, a thief with no lock picks or angle grinders).
That could explain why some cities saw much bigger spikes than others - or it might not! Feels sloppy.
edit: this obviously doesn't negate your point, there's clearly an enormous spike. It's just weird since the article took the time to break it down by city, and to call attention to some cities seeing larger spikes than others.
If it's required, it should be documented.
Apparently it's more of a joke, you can do it completely bare handed if you don't mind tearing some plastic and manage to grab a finicky bit. The cars have no immobilizers at all apparently.
Afaik, lawsuits again gun manufacturers are actually successful [1].
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/sandy-hook-school-shooting-reming...
I'd like to see the data here. Is there any indication that the crime wouldn't be present in other areas of life? Would the people committing these crimes be law-abiding citizens if not for the temptation of these cars being easier to steal? Or would the police resources be spent on alternate crimes? It seems the common denominator here is people willing to commit crimes, not the city's claim that it "would not have been" if the company increased security.
Almost all crime is committed by a tiny, tiny group of people - in NYC, 327 people commit 1/3rd of all shoplifting. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre...
We used to just warehouse people like this, and we stopped because that was mean and did not get us likes on Instagram.
It's really, really unjust.
Easily stolen cars lead to nuisance behavior that affects far more than the immediate victim of the theft.
Yea, I don't think that is it.
> "Car thieves ... engage in reckless driving, creating substantial safety risks to themselves and Baltimore residents and their property."
I don't see anything about Hyundai or Kia taking the cars for joy rides. They are not going out and encouraging people to steal their cars. They are not responsible for enforcing community standards. There is no law which states they must use any certain anti-theft technology. The cars are in no way malfunctioning. So why is there a lawsuit?
Why not go after the owners? They bought the cars and didn't care whether they had anti-theft technology.
I didn't read it either... because I'd read a bunch of other articles and watched videos about the problem a couple of months ago.
IMHO the root cause is that it's impossible with current legislation/courts practice to deter this kind of behaviour. Specifically:
* Many of the perpetrators are minors
* Stealing a car, depending on cirsumstances, is a misdemeanor
* There is no mounting of repeated offenses
* Police can't keep the suspects on custody for long and prosecution is overkill for the results
So more or less, stealing a car is free. And instead of fixing the above points (maybe Baltimore as a city can't do that on its own) the "solution" is suing car makers.
I do remember that the police officers were very clear that they can do nothing. Even if the arrest the kids, the DA won't prosecute them.
I.e. it wasn't like the manufacturers decided that they were useful, they were forced to introduce them by the national or pan-national authorities.
If the US didn't mandate them, the reference to industry standards is - at best - a very feeble one, the city of Baltimore could - maybe - sue the NHTSA
Thieves got into it and tried extremely hard to force the ignition and steal it. They tried hammering a flat head into it and rotating. Didn't work. They tried grabbing the outside of the mechanism with some kind of pliers and rotate, and that didn't work. I can see they easily spent several minutes on the whole ordeal, and didn't get anywhere. The entire lock mechanism was destroyed, almost shaved smaller from how many times they tried and their pliers slipped.
When I got to it a few days later, I had to get home using that truck. I put the key in the ignition and turned it, and drove off.
No.
After 5 minutes of searching you see that a USB-A connector just happens to fit perfectly over the nub in the ignition and allows you to turn it.
The problem is there is no engine immobilizer. So you can start the engine just by physically turning the ignition. I thought EI was pretty much standard on all cars post late 90's.
1. Alarm sounds for 60s, increased from 30s
2. The key must be in the ignition for the vehicle to start
Many others I know have had cars broken into, homes broken into, tons of packages stolen, property vandalized, etc. Basically any form of property crime you can imagine.
The idea that Hyundai or Kia are somehow culpable for these this extreme social dysfunction is absolutely farcical. Vagrants and criminals are kept like livestock by the local government and a class of parasitic NGOs- left to terrorize normal law-abiding citizens who barely have a legal recourse to violence should one of these incidents go sideways.
It would take Ra's al Ghul to resolve the problems of this city
Feels like the 70s in Urban America repeating itself. I feel bad for the older Black population in Baltimore. They busted ass for the last 50 years and they got to enjoy a really lovely city from like 2009 to 2013. Imagine growing up like Henrietta Lacks, only to have all your shit stolen by teenagers who are legally untouchable.
Please don’t come on my turf and start trashing out city without facts.
I just looked down my street to Fort McHenry and our flag was still there :)
In Baltimore, Maryland, you cannot vote while in prison. But you can once you get out. Felony conviction or no.
(I honestly don't think that the population with felony convictions are significant factors in elections, but they can and do vote.)
Having a steering wheel lock has worked so far since then, but there is a tremendous incentive for someone to ruin my car again given the chance, since it'll (maybe always) appear to be an easy target, kill switch or no.
I think it's Autralia where like 80% of the car theft are done with the owner's key? (Too lazy to look for the citation)
Good scotty kilmer video on one such option
I heard OCP has some ideas and products they'd like to pitch.
From the outside, the policies seem to defy all common sense. Doubling down on bad policy seems like foolishness, naivety, denial, complicity, or AOTA. When the plane's computer is saying 'terrain.', 'terrain.', at what point do you decide to pull up, and what does that even look like in Balitmore? The complexity of Baltimore's problems brings out the defeatist in anyone, but I think there are some obvious starting points.
It reminds me of C.S. Lewis's statement about progress:
"Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.
If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man."
Nearer to what are Baltimore's leader's trying to get?
The character of the bad outcomes certainly changes with longevity, such as entrenchment, as you mention. The fixes must also be different. I'm not disagreeing with you that these cities and their situations are entirely different.
This is a tremendous leap in logic, but I am suggesting that Baltimore's problems can and do exist wholly independently of the engineering standards of Korean automakers
Imo now is a great time to buy property if you can deal with the rest.
Sorry to hear about the bad string of luck those close to you have had. It's vile and disgusting how much psychopathic behavior is tolerated by some residents in the city.
From other comments I get the sense that yes they can show this, but defence can argue that the crime would happen anyway. A bit like the security system doesn’t stop a burglar it makes them walk to the next home.
This kind of thing has resounding consequences. Baltimore is a city with a complicated history; for one thing, it's down from it's peak of almost 1M people to under 600k [4]. There's a significant history of racism in Maryland at large. There's a lot of fundamental issues, ranging from food deserts to lack of public transportation among the poorer areas. But to say that "[I]t would take Ra's al Ghul to resolve the problems of this city" is not true. It's certainly not all sunshine and roses, there's a lot of work being done at the grassroots as well, from new local investigative news organizations like the Baltimore Banner being funded to small makerspaces being set up in the now-plentiful well-built, but unused buildings that cities like Boston or Washington, DC. would only dream about having near their harbor or highways, and it's unfair to dismiss these things as being worthless.
[1] https://baltimorefishbowl.com/stories/baltimore-officials-co...
[2] https://www.wbaltv.com/article/baltimore-city-control-police...
[3] https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/politics-power/local-gove...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore#Demographics (other sources available)
Food deserts in Baltimore? Like the Mondowmin Mall that was destroyed by residents during the Freddie Gray riots? And the companies that tried to rebuild and provide in the neighborhood, only to be robbed constantly to the point that companies gave up for not being able to guarantee workers'safety?
And public transport, in areas where cabbies fear to go, buses take hours, and electric scooters and bikes are routinely dumped in the harbor? Vandalism runs rampant. Bus seats are sliced open, gang members threaten riders, etc.
I hate what poor Baltimore has become. Yuppie white-collar Baltimore thrives, just not in these areas. 35 yrs ago I love going to Balt to play tourist. Nice people, Inner Harbor, restaurants, stores... Employed so many people. Corrupt city government at all levels, corrupt cops, and promotion of a victim mentality are some of the things that brought it down. Baltimore is screwed in general, by its own actions.
A good example of this is the East-West Red Line project, which would have been the only cross-city rail line that didn't go North-South among the already well-serviced neighborhoods, with a lot of that money getting spent re-vitalizing those areas. But once again, this isn't a cause for dismissal--the new Governor Moore has made reviving the Red Line project possible again[3], which (if it happens), could be a huge boon for the city. Imagine NYC without the MTA or Boston without the MBTA--almost unthinkable. These kind of projects, which finally have the potential to become un-stalled, offer hope of moving Baltimore in that direction.
[1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/06/20/larry-hogan-purple-...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/fiv...
[3] https://www.wbaltv.com/article/reviving-baltimore-red-line-p...
One of my neighbors has a recent kia that is not susceptible to these hacks, and 2 weeks ago witnessed these teens trying to steal her car one night. She went out and told them they were on camera, and they threatened her and kept trying to steal the car. She called the police who came later and explained steering wheel locks and did little else. The next night the same teens came back, and this time having learned about the details, went out and informed them that her car was not susceptible. They continued trying, damaging the ignition with a screwdriver but not stealing it. The third night in a row, she left a note explaining it in the window, which did not deter them but cause them to bust out the window with the note taped on it.
The city is now distributing steering wheel locks for free to any kia owners, but they have caused a local shortage and can no longer offer them.
I've had neighbors waiting for their appointment to have the ignition modified have their cars totaled.
If you street park your car, even if it isn't a kia, you have high odds of being side swiped by one of these kids on purpose.
It's not a car theft issue, it's a legal joyride and clout exercise. You are lucky if your city is still only experiencing car theft and not this new form of car terrorism.
Why is this not the obvious solution?
(not as if you could single-handedly enact it, of course, but why isn't the city's leadership doing so?)
Turns out that just putting people in jail doesn't make society safer.
To be honest I don't understand the laws but in my city there is a dude who has literally been charged with car vandalism 90 times, let alone all the times he's gotten away with it.
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/atlanta-police-suspect-90-p...
Rich people buy up the nicest houses. They buy themselves new Teslas. They buy $5k sofas and $10k refrigerators and $20k NFTs. They hire landscapers and cleaners and movers and roofers and pay them minimum wage, or less. They buy up all the other houses and rent them out for double the mortgage payments. They get a $50k bonus from their job at some payday-loan-app startup and they buy another Tesla. All while their neighbors starve.
And then one day someone steals one of their Teslas, and they bemoan the injustice that normal, law-abiding citizens like them face and resolve to hate the poor even more.
It's social dysfunction alright, just not how you think.
They hire private security for they gated community, don't have any Teslas stolen, bemoan on how poor kids that steal cars are a result of dysfunctional society and pat each other on backs for being so progressive. All while completely ignoring the fact that it's mostly other poor people, who are victims of those crimes. See [0]
[0] https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/status-symbols-and-the-...
Yes, yes, I know that Hyundai and Kia vehicles are easy pickings, but they talk as though “those vehicles are easy to steal, so those teenagers, they just felt so compelled to…” Nobody forces somebody to steal a car. If anti-theft prevents a car theft, consider that is still someone who had intent to steal a vehicle if it were possible.
Maybe to put in software terms - a login page that allowed anyone to sign in to any account by viewing source and finding an admin login button sitting there for anyone to see.
It truly is a flawed design. Yes, a design that might not be flawed for many societies around the world, but it's certainly flawed for a product that is sold in the USA.
It is funny how conditioned we are to assume people online will be as malicious as we allow them to be.
This is like selling one of those old Kryptonite locks that could be defeated with a Bic pen. At that point, the lock is truly defective, and should be pulled from the market. Your lock should require something more than a readily-available, vaguely key-shaped object to operate—so if you can operate the lock with a Bic pen (like the old Kryptonite locks) or a USB charging cable (like the new Kias), the lock is defective.
Baltimore is quite literally suing because two manufacturers aren’t doing what other manufacturers do, because it would be more convenient for them, despite there being no rule requiring such technology.
That’s a slippery slope. For heaven’s sake let’s make a rule, but trying to sue a manufacturer for not doing what other manufacturers do in absence of a law seems dangerous.
Let’s say Tesla and Ford start requiring all auto parts to be digitally paired, to “prevent theft,” so parts are not interchangeable. If this case succeeds, any automaker who doesn’t do that could be found liable.
Basically, I think mens rea is a much more sound basis for law than rules prescribing specific behavior, in general. Like, if you are an engineer and you design a bridge, and it turns out that the bridge fails and you should have known that it would fail, you bear the liability. This basic doctrine can be augmented with specific rules (like, cars must have back-up cameras and airbags, houses must have three-prong outlets with proper grounds and GFCI in bathrooms & kitchens), but the law should not have to make rules for everything before it happens—as long as you have mens rea (you knew the risks or should have known the risks), you bear some responsibility for your actions.
This is a false dilemma. You can go after both.
should bike manufacturers also be sued for not designing a bicycle in a way that cannot be ridden off by anyone who is not the owner when parked?
idk how people defend these frivolous suits.
Imagine if Google sold a Pixel whose fingerprint sensor could be bypassed if you just licked your finger before pressing the sensor. Suddenly this phone is now the target of thieves because it's easily unlocked and wiped. You're suggesting there's no onus on the manufacturer for that?
the scenario you proposed is already possible with face unlock and identical twins and look-alikes. should we sue Apple?
Kia owners don’t really have an alternative. The car is defective.
> the scenario you proposed is already possible with face unlock
I didn't mention face unlock. Any fingerprint sensor that is trivial defeated is fundamentally broken.
I know you didn't. The point is that your phone can be accessed by those who are not you.
and the standards should be around safety
You:
1) need to enter the vehicle (lockpick, smashed window, etc.)
2) break the ignition block to remove the key cylinder
3) turn a tab underneath the cylinder with whatever you see fit (pliers)
Only coincidentally the tab fits inside a USB A connector.
Now, that the ignition block may be (or may be not) easier to break than any other one could be debated, but - unlike the Kryptonite locks - you need to break it by force.
Think about it this way: no one forces a kid to jump into a pool and drown, but if you have a pool without a fence completely surrounding it and the kid does just that, you are liable for the damages by creating an attractive nuisance. Hyundai created the situation of easily stolen cars by not "building the fence around their pool".
If you do manage to track down your car, you won't get a timely enough response from the police to hold folks who stole it accountable. Most of the time they'll simply claim that they procured the car from someone else, and the police don't push the issue. Same with bicycle theft.
With Kia and Hyundai the cars involved are actually much worse than the comparable alternatives. Several cities are seeing a big increase in car thefts almost entirely due to more Kia and Hyundai thefts using methods that would not have worked on the 96% of cars in the US that have immobilizers.
This design truly is flawed. Traditionally, the immobilizer in an ignition system is physically tied to the steering column. Basically, you'd need to remove the steering column (the physical pipe that goes between your steering wheel and the front steering rack) in order to remove the part. If you want to defeat that immobilizer, you need to do a massive amount of damage to the mechanism, and that damage usually destroys the electronics that register the correct key being put into the ignition switch. This is more or less a self-reinforcing security feature, since the car wont start without this electronic signal.
Kia/Hyundai decided to just tack a little immobilizer module on without integrating it into the steering column, and they didn't even do a decent job mechanically securing it to the column from the outside. That means you can jam a screwdriver in there and pop the "security" mechanism off. Once that's gone, you're left with a little (conveniently USB sized) nub that can be turned which will immediately start the car. No muss, no fuss, no recognition that it's missing its immobilizer module.
Its a fundamentally flawed design, and it never should have made it past review.
so in effect baltimore is suing kia becuase their cars are getting stolen which is ridiculous.
i don't know how anyone can defend this.
this would be like baltimore suing banks for allowing customers to put in the pin "1234" after seeing a spike in money theft through ATMs.
if Baltimore wants the cars to be harder to steal, then they should work with the governor to pass a law that requires cars sold in Maryland to have whatever security functionality they deem necessary.
no. rather what would happen is that the bank would rightfully ask them to fix it or they would go with another manufacturer that meets their needs.
likewise, the government should increase the standard if they're not happy with it. not give the rubber stamp and still complain.
Baltimore didn't buy these cars.
I also wonder if auto insurance companies might refuse to insure Kia and Hyundai vehicles until this is fixed.
It was absolutely predictable that these cars would be stolen and that the police would have to deal with the fallout. Just because there's no explicit law does not mean that Kia doesn't know better. Kia needs to pay for that.
If I owned one of these defective cars, I'd also be keen on participating in a lawsuit against the company.
If these cars had a defect that caused them to suddenly catch fire and burn down neighborhoods, you'd bet there would be lawsuits from everyone, including cities who pay for fire departments.
Well, the government does already set a bunch of standards for cars.
And before the car leaves the factory, it's fine for the government to be issuing mandatory standards for lights, spare parts, seatbelts, crash safety, pedestrian protection, fuel economy and so on.
But the government having a second, secret set of requirements? That can change without anyone being notified? To me that seems rather irregular.
To me, that seems like a responsible way to react to an irregular situation.
Affected owners should put together a class action and force a recall on the affected cars. As for those who actually got their cars stolen - they should take that up with the police and their insurance.
Not making excuses for Kia. They should absolutely get penalties for taking shortcuts. But I feel that higher insurance premiums and a bad reputation would take care of it. And people won’t buy their cars.
Yes. In numerous cities the car theft rate has gone way up in the last couple of years, in some doubling or more, with something like 95% of the increase being thefts of these particular Kia and Hyundai models.
It is a flawed design, but there’s just one problem for a lawsuit: Immobilizers are not legally required in the US. A flawed immobilizer is fine, considering there doesn’t even need to be an immobilizer.
Baltimore is suing because, yes, they are easy to steal and that makes things inconvenient for Baltimore. But no law was broken - there is no law requiring cars to be hard to steal. Thus they are trying to claim “public nuisance” instead of “negligence.”
This, in my mind, is a super slippery slope. You know parts pairing on iPhones, where you can’t swap the camera without Apple’s approval? One day there could be a carmaker or two that pairs everything from mirrors to catalytic converter to “prevent theft and fraud.” If Baltimore wins, anyone who doesn’t do that could be found liable. Just an extreme example of how this could go sideways fast.
Or let’s say two or three bike manufacturers start putting GPS systems into their bikes, to prevent theft. Can any bike manufacturer that doesn’t do that be sued in the future? I would argue, they should absolutely not be in absence of a law.
Baltimore, not being the customer, probably lacks standing.
Or perhaps they should have owners sign a release, promising not to operate or store the vehicle in any zip code that insurance companies deem high risk.
If you don’t like that, and I don’t, change the law. Don’t sue for something completely legal because it makes life inconvenient for a city. There is a long list of things cities find inconvenient, like bicycles without a built-in GPS, or even things as dumb as American flags in an upscale neighborhood.
I don't understand this reasoning. The city believes there is already a law under which what the car manufacturer did is not legal. They and the car manufacturer will go in front of a judge where the city will need to prove this, while the lawyers of the car manufacturer will presumably argue otherwise.
Should I be feeling bad for Kia that they have to justify their choices?
But that's not what this case is about. To use your analogy, imagine KIA were a lock maker such as Kwikset. You bought their lock to install on your front door. You locked your door and left the house. You came back and your TV was gone, with no signs of forced entry. That's when you discover a major flaw in the design of the lock - if you turn the knob the opposite way then the lock will unlock from the outside. It's a flaw in the design. The lock maker is definitely legally liable for that defect, and, this is the important point, the city of Baltimore could sue them claiming damages incurred by having excessive police calls caused by their defective product. Of course every case is different, but Baltimore would be likely to win.
I'd say they're likely to win in this case as well. Since KIA has been aware of this problem for some time and taken no steps to resolve it, I imagine Baltimore is applying some financial incentive. As other cities take note they too may file their own suits and then KIA may realize it's cheaper and better PR to issue a massive and costly recall.
Now practically, whether it's legal or not, no one is going to help you.
To the extent that common law is generally adopted in the United States, theft is the intentional taking of the property of another with the intent to permanently deprive the owner of said property. It doesn't matter whether there's forced entry or not (you may be thinking of burglary -- either way, principles of "constructive breaking" could still apply depending on the law as codified by a given jurisdiction).
Even from a less pedantic standpoint, if I had a home surveillance system that captured the entire incident on camera (along with the perpetrator's face and the license plate of the vehicle that he used to drive off with my TV), there is still sufficient evidence to arrest and prosecute. There is no legal requirement of "signs of forced entry" to sustain a theft charge under these circumstances.
If the theft was part of a bigger issue with (to use the Kwikset hypothetical) the vendor's product defect allowing mass thefts then it would be important to the police.
This is not correct. The police will take a report, and your insurance (if you have it) will cover your TV even if you left the door wide open. Even if you were drunk. Even if you weren't drunk. There is no clause in standard insurance policies or our laws and statutes that failure to lock shit up somehow makes it free for anyone else to take.
The problem with Hyundai & Kia is that they elected not to include this 25 year old technology at all.
Probably fair, according to the anecdata collected in my travels in life so far. This view of the US seems common, almost consensus.
> he thinks they are far too low and want them increased more
This part, I don't think is typical (or even widespread) among Americans, and I don't see it expressly endorsed by ravensfan69 - seems like you are presuming it.
It seems to me that, by very far, the common American sentiment is, "our justice system has failed, and the focus on incarceration has made crime worse instead of better."
On the other hand, many types of crime - especially violent crime - have fallen in my lifetime in the US, in concert with much of the rest of the world.
But yeah, we Americans don't like prisons and we know damn well that our state is just building them as an end-around to achieve a plantation economy. We're not stupid.
I should launch a lawsuit against the contractor who built my house because even though the doors have locks a third can break in with nothing more than a rock and some willingness to maybe get cut on shattered glass
There is no expectation when a window is sold that it cannot be smashed with a rock.
Further details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_warranty
Kia/Hyundai need to fix their security flaw.
Baltimore may not be a large market, but there are also several other cities suing, and at least 18 state attorney generals have gotten involved. That's a much larger market than Baltimore.
Maybe they should implement car burkas?
I'm also still a little disappointed that the MSRP came out about 10% higher than the estimates. We're getting into too much money for a car there.
2015-2021 Hyundai Accent (all body styles)
2015-2021 Hyundai Elantra (two-door and four-door)
2015-2021 Hyundai Kona
2015-2021 Hyundai Santa Fe
2015-2021 Hyundai Tucson
2015-2018 Hyundai Veloster
2015-2021 Kia Forte
2015-2021 Kia Optima
2015-2016 Kia Optima Hybrid
2015-2021 Kia Rio (all body styles)
2015-2021 Kia Sedona
2015-2016 Kia Sorento
2015-2021 Kia Soul
2015-2021 Kia Sportage
> Hyundai is offering a free software update to prevent thefts on certain targeted vehicles, starting Tuesday on nearly 4 million Hyundais on the road. The first million eligible cars are 2017 to 2020 Elantra, 2015 to 2019 Sonata and 2020 to 2021 Venue vehicles. Affected owners can bring in the car to Hyundai dealerships for the free anti-theft upgrade. It takes about an hour to install. Once updated a window decal will (hopefully) alert and deter thieves from targeting the vehicle.
> The next batch of eligible vehicles will go in for the software update in June and includes a long list of Kia models, including:
2018-2022 Accent
2011-2016 Elantra
2021-2022 Elantra
2018-2020 Elantra GT
2011-2014 Genesis Coupe
2018-2022 Kona
2020-2021 Palisade
2013-2018 Santa Fe Sport
2013-2022 Santa Fe
2019 Santa Fe XL
2011-2014 Sonata
2011-2022 Tucson
2012-2017, 2019-2021 Veloster
[2] https://www.forbes.com/wheels/news/kia-hyundai-car-thefts-se...
Baltimore is an independent city, so it can't rely on county assistance for anything. Furthermore, state law prevents Baltimore (and only Baltimore) from annexing suburbs to increase the tax base, which is how literally every city in America grows. This results in obvious financial problems, as the city cannot expand its income to keep up with costs of services to the impoverished people who remain after the exit of the steel industry and the tremendously reduced longshoreman cadre.
Into all of this, some asshole carmakers decided to sell machines which are ready theft targets, able to be started by anyone who can get their hands on a USB stick. The spike in thefts of these products has a material effect on police availability. Where is Baltimore supposed to get the funding to meet this increase in demand for city services? They can't annex taxable land. They can't control policing policies.
What would you do?
St. Louis is the other major independent city. The state doesn't restrict its ability to annex suburbs, but it hardly matters. It doesn't happen, anyway, and it almost certainly wouldn't in Baltimore, either. Who wants either city's problems?
It is unclear whether the PBGC (https://www.pbgc.gov/) will bail out the small municipalities. But i'd bet that Illinois, California, LA, NYC get bailouts. In such a situation, it would make sense for a municipality to join in with a "too-big-to-fail" entity.
I'm not a local government expert, but i'm seen enough bailouts to think these are decent guesses.
Famously Ford refused to bail out New York when they went bust back in '75 (he did later sign legislation giving them loans, but my understanding is that those were paid back).
Probably also depends on the trifecta, since during the Obama administration (republicans controlled the house), the city of Detroit went bankrupt and nobody bailed them out either.
Source 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_New_York_City_(1946...
That is for American politics to figure out. This is an American political issue and blaming Korean car makers is absurd.
Engine immobilisers cut out all the easy “jam a USB stick in there” attacks, The Kia Boys do not exist in Australia where they’ve been mandatory for 20 years.
Lesson here for Americans - if you want something like this it has to be legislated. Cheap manufacturers will absolutely save a few bucks and not include it if they can.
I have had my car stolen twice so this issue isn't distant from me, if it has become a state issue it needs a state solution.
Individual responsibility seems to be the American preference though, on an individual level you have the ability to install an immobiliser, and being familiar with the car's features when you make such a massive purchase shouldn't be unreasonable.
This is a darkly hilarious take.
Now I live in a country where it's normal to leave cars with open windows and even doors in the street so that they don't overheat in the sun. Sometimes even with keys dangling.
No immobilisers necessary -- only decent people are.
How would you feel if in the rest of the world kids pajamas were made of fabric that didn't burn easily / melt onto skin, but in the US due to lax regulation, companies were making them out of cheaper fabric that is practically tinder and easily melts to the skin, but slightly cheaper?
Would you still bleat about how it's "American politics" and not reprehensible, immoral cost-cutting?
This kind of thing is standard practice in almost every industry. Products are generally manufactured according to safety standards that are required in the country of sale. This is especially prevalent in cars. Things like airbags, crumple zones, even seatbelts. Plenty of countries where cars are sold without backseat seatbelts.
Id also be genuinely interested in a source for your claim of immobilizers being required in the "vast majority" of other countries as my Google skills are failing to find it. Furthermore, in the other countries where one is not required, has this ommission led to the same "predictable impacts on society" there?
I thought it was due to anti-consumer practices.
Not doing that is a very good thing in the long run: https://www.strongtowns.org/
-4th highest per pupil spend in the country. Definition of money not well spent?
It's a weird move from a party that claims to be about "small" government and local control.
They're so busy trying to "own" the libs that they have forgotten, or simply don't care, that those cities are usually generating tax revenue that supports the outlying rural areas.
in all seriousness, this is a problem I've thought about a lot, and I have no idea what the answer is. baltimore has a lot of the building blocks for a wonderful place to live, but it is a deeply sick city.
it has infrastructure built for a million plus, but less than 600k actually living in the city limits and fewer than that paying any meaningful amount of taxes. and like you say, what tax base exists is fleeing across the county line every year.
it's a cool and affordable (for the east coast) city to live in through your mid to late twenties. but between the crime, high taxes that kick in early, and abysmal public school system, there's a very strong incentive to leave once you have kids and can't afford private school. while boring af, the county is simply way more appealing for middle to upper-middle income families, which ought to be the core of the tax base.
with BPD having utterly failed to earn trust with the community and a political class more interested in grandstanding and stuffing their own pockets than doing anything that might be called "governance", I really don't see how the city pulls out of this nosedive anytime soon.
But yeah let's blame carmarkers for shitty behavior by one of the worst cities in the country.
On the upside, cleaning shop is needed and this helped get that started.
I hope you live in this city to reap the reward of such crime that's an obvious fallout of your lovely ideas that has dominated it's city politics for decades.
Those lists (with some few exceptions for top cars) usually reflect the "most sold" or "most common" cars, as these represent the largest "market" for spare parts.
The sad part is their voter base will somehow think any alternative ideas that lean even a bit to the right of their radical left policies is too extreme and that the status quo of double digit homicide and poverty levels unseen in almost any other city are preferred.
Get a good look at the root of the issue in America. It's found in Baltimore and san Francisco.
More importantly, this is a strange lawsuit. Bicycles get stolen all the time, are bicycle manufacturers going to get sued by cities?
If bicycle thefts doubled in dozens of cities all around the country over a couple years or so, and the doubling was almost entirely due to people stealing a couple particular Schwinn models that had been designed in a way that makes them massively easier to steal compared to everything else and it is not obvious to purchasers that this is so, then yes, Schwinn would probably get sued.
Why should we punish people who repeatedly commit crime anyway? Fuck it, why do anything? Let's sue Kia instead, maybe we can get a payday
The city is suing to recover the money they spent on all the police efforts expended because Kia cut corners to reduce costs.
Your and at the end is really just building a straw man, it's not what's being discussed here.
Deadly Crash Brings New Attention To Viral 'Kia Challenge' Trend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B1laqHpw7A
Robbins police: 3 teens in stolen Kia arrested after 71-year-old man dies in crash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC_QeFdPtus
Teen killed, suspect on the run after stolen car crashes on Roosevelt Boulevard https://www.fox29.com/news/police-stolen-kia-involved-deadly...
You simply switched to an argument you could 'win' despite no one else actually bringing it up or refuting it.
Maybe the problem is the thieves?
But of course you are right, only one problem can ever exist and the problem is car thieves.
And P.S. the police in the city have been handing out steering wheel locks and educating affected owners, so I believe you are misinformed.
"You dressed like that? It's your fault"
But if someone breaks into my house--regardless of whether it was unlocked, the lock was defective, or they broke a window--and the police are negligent or incompetent in investigating or prosecuting the perpetrators, in what world is that a) not the police's fault? and b) an opportunity for the _police_ to sue the _manufacturer_?
If I start a cultural movement to get rid of front door locks and it gains traction, and then B&Es spike, can the police sue _me_ too?
I don't know why you want to try and link the idea of a cultural movement? There's very clearly a difference between a defective product and a deliberate decision.
When you see an Asian granny being beaten up you don't sue her for being so easy to beat up.
Case in point. A couple of teens stole a car, smashed it into another car, killed a 6mo old and put his mother in the hospital. The charges? Trespassing.
The United States is an exception to the rule being the only first world country that I know of to not mandate engine immobilizers (I'm sure someone will be able to point an exception, but overall these are mandatory in a lot of countries for decades already).
You need to access the vehicle (if you are good by opening the door with a lockpick or with some other non-damaging trick, otherwise breaking a window), then you force the ignition block, removing the lock cylinder, then you use something to turn the ignition on.
In the '80's you would have probably used a screwdriver, as what remained below the removed lock cylinder would have been a slot, on these particular models you could use a pair of thin nosed pliers but a USB A connector is coincidentally just the right size for the "tab" that has to be turned.
You may not be able to stop desparate people from stealing, but if kids are repeatedly stealing cars for entertainment, then problem isn't the security of the cars.
People have also failed to mention the part where insurers are dropping people with Kia Souls because they are too high risk.
It's totally fair for absolutely no one in the US to buy from KIA again. But if they were following the law by omitting ignition locking (maybe under some misguided notion that the US isn't as crime ridden as it is).
There's some countries and still some parts of the US where you could realistically leave the cars in the ignition for weeks and the car wouldn't be stolen. This is nothing but a symptom of a larger issue.
This already happened almost 20 years ago in the United States. Ingersoll Rand was sued when it was shown that their Kryptonite locks could be opened with a Bic pen. Ingersoll Rand ended up settling. [0] I will grant that actual owners of the easily picked bike lock have obvious grounds to sue, whereas in the case of municipalities suing Hyundai due to theft problems, showing that the municipality is an injured party with standing to sue Hyundai isn’t as clear.
[0] https://www.reallaw.us/2007/04/25/class_action_defense_cases...
Are there things that could be improved? Sure. Roll up them sleeves.
You may be experiencing a bit of proximity bias. Roads all over the north east are torn up.
I'd argue the school district issue can be fixed, but it will take funding.
As for the schools, they already get a ton of funds: https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/update-balti...
But more money won't fix systemic incompetence, corruption (https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/former-baltimore-mayor-ca...), and misguided policies.
Government should thank Kia for making criminals easier to spot.
Government should raise fees for people who buy substandard cars and then waste city resources dealing with their trash.
Car owners could sue Kia for selling defective cars.
Insurance companies should charge far more for Kias.
Government should mandate insurance cost disclosures as part of car sales.
Problem solved.
> Insurance companies should charge far more for Kias.
Great, someone made the unknowing mistake of buying one of these defective cars before it was known they are easily stolen. Now their insurance goes up and they have to sue the manufacturer. How many people actually have the money to deal with that? Suing the car company is expensive. And if I don't have the cash to buy another car (and the trade in value of the one I have has crashed) I'm just stuck paying increased insurance costs. And fees from the city, apparently.
This isn't the economic motivation you think it is, it's just pushing the burden onto the owners who had no idea what they were getting themselves into.
What you've done is proposed a bunch of complicated rules that burden consumers and dealers to do everything possible to prevent people from buying these cars, all so you can avoid just having the manufacturer do a recall. The government can simply say that the cars lack safety features, force a recall, and move on. Cut out all the consumer-unfriendly bureaucracy.
The concerns are valid
>Certain Kia or Hyundai models can be stolen using a screwdriver and a USB charging cord.
>Cleveland, St. Louis and Seattle are among the other cities that started suing the the car companies earlier this year. Baltimore’s lawsuit says the companies “failed to keep up with industry standards,” and claim it was a result of business decisions made to reduce costs and boost profits “notwithstanding decades of academic literature and research supporting the deterrent effects” of anti-theft technology.
>Car thefts in the city have nearly doubled this year compared to the same time last year, part of a nationwide trend after videos showing how to easily steal the vehicles racked up millions of views on TikTok.
In a sexist way would be similar that you are being raped because you wear some specific clothes.
Or you are hacked because you don't apply a patch.
Car makers should make their cars as hard as reasonably possible to steal.
If dumb ass tenager can do that, the it is a mess
If you don't take "reasonable precautions" then you are liable.
I will also note that I often see comments here talking about living in SF and how they leave their car unlocked or windows down to limit the damage from thieves smashing the windows to get inside.
So with this "reasonable precautions" line, everyone who does this should be liable for promoting theft.
Sounds stupid, like the way to blame hyundai or kia for existence of scum people like thieves.
In other societies crime is not normal, and "teenagers" have two braincells to understand that a thief is a repugnant person and that the consequences are not worth it.
Hyundai has some of the safest, most efficient small cars on the road, for great prices. I'd say these things are a net positive to "public safety" over all.
[0] https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/tech/2022/09/129_336571.htm...
It absolutely is, though.
By only looking at cities you are pulling in a large number of other policies and effects that only cities may have implemented.
The fact that there are consumer products whose absence of features creates a negative externality for local law enforcement doesn't seem like sufficient grounds for standing, and this sort of thing is hardly limited to auto antitheft features. Awarding a municipality damages or other relief here would set precedent opening the door to all sorts of whacky things. Should spraypaint manufacturers be held liable for graffiti? Should speaker manufacturers that sell devices without decibel-output-limiters be held liable for noise complaints? The sane answer here to all of this seems like 'no'.
The appropriate venue for dealing with this is federal auto safety regulations, not municipalities trolling manufacturers in civil court.
Clearly there has to be some degree to which a customer can assume that a product they buy meets the standard functionality associated with that product.
It's a self-correcting problem, no lawsuit required.
The city could even have a special tax on "cars without immobilizers" that Kia owners paid, to cover their costs. Again: no lawsuit required.
You might as well say that a company that produces an exceptionally desirable product, one that perhaps entices thieves, would be responsible for a crime increase.
"Failing to keep up with industry standards" is also ridiculous because it's just a bandwagon fallacy.
When they purchase a car, a reasonable person would assume that the key works to the degree that is standard in the industry.
Baltimore can make a standard requiring cars to have a better anti-theft system, but they haven't.
If Kia is liable for inducing crime, government should be similarly liable for allowing crime; as preventing it is their main job.
Does that really exceed the cost damage done if they're left to keep on stealing/crashing cars? At some point they'll kill someone, and the 'cash value of a human life' question will come up.
Yes, "You prevent theft by putting thieves in jail." But it's actually complicated if you adopt a realistic stance other than "I want to speak with the manager".
The part that's Hyundai's fault is both the ridiculously easy to steal a car BUT also they dragged their feet when asked to address the issue and didn't do anything other than telling police and local governments "Wait for the next model in a couple of years"
Damn you right, it's so simple, why didn't they thought of just putting the thieves in jail?!
Also, seems like this whole "people stealing cars" thing doesn't just happen in Baltimore. What if putting the thieves in jail could work in other cities too? Maybe even internationally?
You could be on to something really big here, I hope people from Baltimore government comes across your comment.
This is such an incredible naive view of the world.
Whether or not crimes are committed is a complicated interplay of cost/benefit.
You say that the city is acting as if thieves are some force of nature. And to a certain extent they are. If it is easy enough to commit a crime and the reward is high enough a crime will be committed. As an example if you leave gold bars littered on your front yard people will pick them up. No amount of "putting thieves in jail" will save you.
Obviously increasing the chance of getting caught acts as a deterrent. But it is not cost free. Investigating and prosecuting car thieves cost hard money. If there are too many thieves of opportunity created by sub-par security arrangements the police/justice system becomes overwhelmed. The city can and should increase their police force of course, but at a certain point it is like trying to stop a tide with a rake. If you can prevent crime before it happens, for example by following sane and cost-efficient security practices that saves money and aggravation for everyone involved.
What prevents crime is multiple overlapping layers of our society engineered such that crime is maintained at a certain level. "putting thieves in jail" is just one of those layers. And if you think you can simply policeman yourself out of any situation then you haven't thought about the problem to a sufficient depth yet
Why do you suppose this is?
What is happening there, that isn't happening in Baltimore?
Of course there is an amount of "putting thieves in jail" which will save you; once all the thieves are in jail, the remainder of the populace would mind their own business and walk past the gold bars.
If your thesis is that literally everyone would steal those gold bars, then I have to point out that this is a very pessimistic view, and that there are multiple different places around the world where it wouldn't happen.
Perhaps. I posit that you are going to run out of one of these things sooner than you are going to run out of thieves though: gold bars, patience of police to hunt down your stolen gold bars, places in prison.
You are going to run out of gold bars because if there is a stash of them unsecured there will be some thieves who either by sheer luck, or by being better at their job than the police at theirs will succesfully get away with stealing them.
You are going to run out of police patience by one of two ways: either immediately, once they hear that your unsecured gold bars were just laying in your front garden. In which case they take your report and chuck it in a drawer to forget about it. Or if you are politically well connected they will try to persuade you to secure them better. If you are literally their king and they can’t convince you to store the gold better they might try to protect it by posting a policeman next to it
And then finnaly if you have so much money that replenishing the stolen gold is not a problem, and you have so much political power that the police is not able to change your storage practices then that is when you are going to run out of space in your prisons.
> If your thesis is that literally everyone would steal those gold bars
Not at all. But it doesn’t need to be. My thesis is that there would be enough people who would try that it overwhelms your police force destined to throw thieves in prison.
In other places around the world those things are controlled by close-knit communities where being seen stealing would spread the word like wildfire and ruin the thief's reputation (or end up in a beating), not because people is purer and immune to sin or idiocy.
It's not pessimistic nor paranoid to lock your door. All it takes is one bad apple, even if it's one in a million.
If so then Baltimore may have a reasonable case. If not then it’s a Baltimore problem.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2023/05/09/stolen-...
> The city of Baltimore has filed a federal lawsuit against car manufacturers Kia and Hyundai, joining a number of cities who say the companies created a public nuisance by making cars that can be easily stolen.
later on:
> Cleveland, St. Louis and Seattle are among the other cities that started suing the the car companies earlier this year.
I feel like this whole thread has a lot of odd takes stirred up by people's suppositions of what happens particularly in "Baltimore".
The US incarcerates more people than China, despite China having more than four times as many people, but the view obviously is the incarceration rate needs to increase even more, as crimes are barely being prosecuted according to him. The US is off the charts in incarceration rates, but he thinks they are far too low and want them increased more, as he sees increasing incarceration even more as the solution to the problem which western Europe does not seem to have to this extent.
So those outside the US can get insights into what the US is and how it thinks from threads like this.
FWIW, the parent poster doesn't want increased incarceration, they want these people executed (probably without due process).
that isn't just wrong -- it's not even what parent said.
Their hyperbole was pointing out that the perceived situation is so bad that it would take something drastic to turn it around, not that they in anyway wanted or desired it.
There is a lot of purposeful misinterpretation/mis-reading going on in this thread, it seems.
Both are hyperbole, but that is indeed what was said and implied. Defend it as rhetoric, don't gaslight it as a purposeful misreading.
"Why do you love criminals and want innocent families to be terrorized and executed by criminals?"
If China is too different, look at western Europe. England's incarceration rate is less than one third of the US's. Canada is on sixth of the US's. These countries have lower incarceration rates but less crime.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarce...
You're right about the comparatively huge US prison population, but the difference is NOT because other countries let violent people and thieves roam free!
People who use extreme violence against other people are deranged. It's a mental health issue. In other countries, it's limited and so the heuristic is to just lock these people up in some place called prison. In the US it's endemic making it difficult to control no matter how many people you are incarcerating.
- higher rates of bad/no parenting
- schools with no ability to deal with bad behavior
This leads to young adults who think they can get away with anything?
Baltimore is one of the worst places I’ve visited for work. Everyone in the office told us visitors to stay on the main streets in downtown.
Baltimore City, MD - Single-Parent Households with Children as a Percentage of Households with Children (5-year estimate) in Baltimore city, MD was 57.45%
I’m sure there are plenty of good single parents out there, but a lot of these kids aren’t getting a good foundation for life?
I know many teachers, and I frequently hear how behavior at schools is the worst they’ve ever seen. It seems like it’s only getting worse.
Many places in the U.S. allow a certain level of criminality, which not only encourages criminal behavior, but means the people involved only face consequences when they do something truly horrendous that brings a long sentence. Let a teenager walk free when they steal cars, and they end up killing the next person they steal a car from (happened here recently). Never charge a stalker when he assaults his stalking victim multiple times while on probation, and he eventually kills her (also happened here recently). Let someone simply walk away from the court after being convicted of an armed robbery, and they'll eventually murder an innocent (again - happened here recently).
It can take years to undo this. We started moving in the right direction - cracked down on crime, brought the crime rates down, which started bringing down the incarceration rate. But then people got impatient and wanted undo everything, with many big promises that never materialized. Now crime rates are up, and we're probably going to end up with more incarceration.
Many other countries have lower incarceration stats. But in my experience, the people in those countries are often shocked when they learn that in nice neighborhoods of the U.S., large groups of men can walk into a store in the middle of the day, openly fill up bags of stolen merchandise in front of everyone, and simply walk out with no consequences. The base level of crime that's accepted in many places in the U.S. is simply much higher than in many other countries.
What? No. This is not remotely a universal American viewpoint -- especially the government being "on the side of the criminals etc." What would that even mean?
It would look, and maybe this is sheer coincidence, very much like our present situation
I imagine that people would gesture at stories like this:
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/suspect...
> Police arrested one of two gun-wielding people caught on camera during a double shooting at a crowded holiday celebration this past weekend in south St. Louis, but the 33-year-old woman was released Wednesday afternoon after the prosecutor’s office refused charges against her.
> The suspect’s release drew public ire, but Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner’s office declined to further explain.
Here's Alvin Bragg, talking about no longer charging certain crimes at all:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/06/us/alvin-bragg-manhattan-dist...
Here's George Gascon doing the same in LA:
https://abc7.com/george-gascon-los-angeles-district-attorney...
If you prefer specific cases, here are some lawyers who were facing domestic terrorism charges for firebombing a police car. They had already plead guilty. They were given a new, lesser plea deal:
https://jonathanturley.org/2022/06/05/new-york-attorneys-acc...
I can find a lot more individual cases. For example, the Zimminskis who may only have been prosecuted because Binger was called to account for that during trial. They managed to get arrested for multiple other crimes, including a kidnapping, while on bail.
2.) The U.S. is not a monolith, so looking at the prison population of the United States as a whole doesn’t tell you about what’s going on in an individual state or city.
3.) The number of people incarcerated has a long tail. In the U.S. in particular, many people received long sentences during the years following the ‘94 crime bill. Little if any effort is being made to commute these despite policies centered on new incarceration changing.
4.) In the places where reduced incarceration is being tried in the U.S. it’s important to recognize that it’s being tried effectively in a vacuum. In many other places which are able to sustain low incarceration rates, there are a lot of social programs that help make that possible, and also programs to help people rehabilitate after a conviction. The U.S. has little if any of that. Where reduced incarceration is being tried, it’s usually not replaced with something that’s more effective.
So yes, while drugs should be deillegalized and those crimes expunged, this is only but a first step on a long road to repairing the severe damage that was done to actual law and order by the very people fallaciously rallying behind "law and order" in the 80's and 90's.
Ultimately the reason we consider some things natural rights isn't to create some prescriptive model that we imagine as the shape an enlightened society will take. Rather it's due to the inevitable ugliness when government attempts to legislate into individual autonomy, and people react en masse. And the results of the "drug war" have most certainly been quite ugly!
Drug Offenses are nearly half the prison population [1]. So the prison population can decrease by significant amounts without releasing any violent criminals.
[1]: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
this is not true. your data is federal only. most prisoners are at state prisons. drug offense is about 1/5 of total.
And is imprisoning people who are smuggling/distributing hard and potentially very dangerous drugs really that controversial?
i was just stating the fact that the initial number posted was wrong/incomplete.
It can ruin the victims life just as much as non-lethal violence (taking away a person's source of income, or transport required to keep a job, or wrecking a business they've spent many years building), but many take the 'it's only property, it's probably insured!' attitude.
And many at least see stealing from 'big nasty corporations' as relatively OK. But if people keep stealing from businesses until they close down or relocate and there's no easy shoplifting targets, will the thieves stop, or will they move on to stealing from homes?
I wonder why insurance is so high...
The problem isn’t just insurance. It’s that prosecution is insanely slow and is far more harmful to society than the actual crime.
I doubt the victims see it that way. If we just let people steal, it can turn into a runaway chain reaction due to a lack of consequences.
If people work for my living and see someone just steal for theirs with absolutely no consequence, what they learn is that social dysfunction is optimal, and that doing otherwise is being a chump.
Now, I do agree in a parallel way, but with a different solution. If we fix structural problems preventing people from being, or having hope of being, productive members of society, than that can prevent some crime.
"mere hundreds of dollars"
This is incredibly insensitive. That's a lot of money to lose to many people.
Insurance increases the expected cost of loss! -- the insurer would go broke if they were charging less than that.
So yeah, sure, it can save you from the boundary effect of it instantly wreaking your life but only by putting you at a constant disadvantage to people who live in less crime prone areas or whom are wealthy enough to self insure against such loss.
People who say this don't have real jobs; not the type of jobs where they'll end up on pain killers when they retire. They have laptop jobs on the softer side of intellectual rigor.
Money is time traded from your life, health traded from your body to your employer. Stealing property is literally stealing the purpose of hours of grueling work.
The liberal position—don’t make relatively harmless stuff illegal—is one way to reduce the amount of crime.
Sure, lock up people who do violent crimes (I mean, get them out of society while we try to figure out if we can get them psychological help), but instead of doing something dystopian like tent prison cities, just let out the people who shouldn’t be there in the first place.
(All that is to say, I agree with you, just think we should focus on the part that will benefit society).
In the past year I've seen different people claim that hemp consumption, property crime, and even intimidation with a firearm were nonviolent and that their perpetrators were merely marginalized individuals who need social assistance rather than prosecution.
I think GP's point is that even property crime is not victimless: It hurts everyone, it makes society worse, and it likely hurts the people at the bottom of society disproportionately.
But I may add, then, that the reformers have the burden of showing evidence for their position: they need to demonstrate that it is possible to have a low-crime, low-prosecution, high social net city somewhere in the US. I'm beginning to suspect that they are missing some critical component which is required to make such a system work for everyone.
> ... property crime is not victimless: It hurts everyone ...
"victimless" and "hurts everyone" are both at the two extreme, opposite ends of a spectrum.
It's fairly likely some of the property crimes occurring could be somewhere in the middle.
Genuine question; is that only physically? If I like causing people pain and anguish and suffering, and my weapon of choice is words, should I also be incarcerated because I hurt people intentionally? I tend towards not giving people a free pass simply because their weapon of choice is words, but (amongst other things) the US has a reputation for being very permissive with the spoken word.
I think there is a massive difference between physical violence (and property crime) and words. What sort of words are you envisioning here?
No, you shouldn't be incarcerated for that. You would be an asshole if you intentionally caused people anguish with your words, but being an asshole is not a crime (and shouldn't be).
No, it isn't. It's the opinion of a single person, and you're taking it for granted that their comment was made in earnest and that they truly represent 'the American view' -- whatever that is.
>So those outside the US can get insights into what the US is and how it thinks from threads like this.
No, they can't. They can learn about the opinion of a single person.
Can you point me to a country with such a unified opinion that any single person can cover the opinions of the entire populous?
If not, why would you assume that such a case may exist for the United States?
And more to the point, the premise was that it is ridiculous to hold the manufacturer of stolen goods to be wholly responsible for the theft in a jurisdiction that has law enforcement -- do you disagree with that, or do you just care to make an example out of someone?
Incarcerating criminals isn't the issue, having so many criminals is the issue.
Is it because most of the violent crimes are related to drug addiction?
Salvador was overrun with gang violence, a new government came in, rounded up the gangsters and crime has gone down. On balance the population of Salvador is better off.
"'The Department of Justice conducted a thorough investigation of Alabama’s prisons for men and determined that Alabama violated and is continuing to violate the Constitution because its prisons are riddled with prisoner-on-prisoner and guard-on-prisoner violence. The violations have led to homicides, rapes, and serious injuries.'"
This is not a system that is going to successfully reintegrate people. We owe a basic level of humane treatment even to prisoners, if not for the sake of liberal values than for the pragmatic reason that violent people who are put in an environment which encourages further violence will remain violent people when they are released back into our society.
Ukraine: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/08/ukraine-four-...
Mexico: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/mexicos-federal-prisons-a-...
Spain: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-77231-8_...
Brazil: https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/qa-why-is-prison-v...
And in Paradise (I mean Cuba): https://democraticspaces.com/trending/2022/3/29/prisoners-de...
Etc...
And since you linked Amnesty, here’s their report on solitary confinement at ADX Florence: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2014/07/usa-prisoners...
Ukraine, Mexico, and Brazil are nowhere near as highly developed as the US.
Spain is definitely closer, but Spain doesn’t execute people like the US does. Of course problems with prisons exist elsewhere.
What’s specifically appalling about the US is the juxtaposition of extreme wealth and relative freedom with widespread, institutionalized abuse and neglect of prisoners, not just to their detriment, but to the detriment of the US as a whole.
At the same time, I wish to point out most other prison systems in the world are similar or worse and suspects before they become prisoners have fewer legal rights afforded them.
That said, the catch-and-release as well as the watch-and-do-nothing approach we're seeing in some places are aggravating crime and they are not doing anyone any favors, the criminals or the victims.
This might be true but I do not think it’s true of most peer countries (Western Europe, Canada, etc). I do believe that US prisons are among the least humane of this group as well as the least effective at rehabilitation. Again, this is not to say that those other systems do not have problems, just that the severity of the worst abuses and the extent of abuse in general is worse here.
> Prisoner rehabilitation does not work, says former prisons boss
> Sir Martin Narey says focus should be on treating inmates with decency and dignity
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/oct/29/prisoner-reh...
> So far, prison inmate rehab isn’t working
> California’s prisons are supposed to be rehabilitating inmates, not merely warehousing them, but a new report from the state auditor says it’s not effectively reducing recidivism among those released from the system.
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/02/so-far-prison-inma...
There is a certain political faction that has developed the habit of observing the effects of jail on criminals while ignoring the effect of criminals on the innocent. I think the parent is reacting to the disingenuousness of this position.
US views criminals a people who failed the society, while at these numbers it would be way more reasonable to see them as people failed by the society.
So it's probably fair enough to compare incarceration rates and numbers.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_China#Ra...
> The exact numbers of people executed in China is classified as a state secret;
In addition to executions, China has been clamping down on entire populations, therefore, preventing future incarceration.
> Uyghur birthrate fell by almost half between 2017-2019, research finds, adding to evidence of coercive fertility policies
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/12/chinese-uyghur...
The GP comment is pushing a certain narrative that (in my view) has been ginned up by reactionary groups for their own ends.
In addition, it's wrong on the facts (insofar as it makes any fact-based claims versus just pushing buttons).
I'll go farther. I scoff most profoundly at the viewpoint of the GP post. I view people pushing it as low-information and politically naive (if they actually believe it) or evil and opportunistic (if they are just "intensifying the contradictions" for their own reactionary ends).
I lived in Vancouver in Canada, that is true there too, Seattle is the same (the CHAZ bs a couple years ago? 3rd avenue in Downtown?). Hell, in Argentina is also the same and that's south america. I think this is more a problem of places with left leaning politics which consider criminals victims of society which means that they can't be held responsible by their actions. Meanwhile, everyone else suffers.
No, everyone outside of your head can get insights into your willingness to cherrypick a single comment and extrapolate to fit your pessimistic, hyper-critical mental model.
It's also interesting how you talk about incarceration rates independently of crime rates, and act as if the US is prosecuting and incarcerating broad swathes of innocent people. For those of us who have had loved ones murdered or assaulted, or been mugged/beaten, we don't have the luxury of thinking of this in an abstract way fitting a bong rip session in a dorm room. Take off the Che Guevara t-shirt, take a walk outside, and realize that the world isn't a neat little theory straight from a professor being interviewed on Democracy Now!.
There's about half a million people in jail right now who haven't been convicted of a crime. Some of them are innocent, for sure.
How often is that, exactly?
> This tendency to lie pervades all police work, not just high-profile violence, and it has the power to ruin lives. Law enforcement officers lie so frequently—in affidavits, on post-incident paperwork, on the witness stand—that officers have coined a word for it: testilying. Judges and juries generally trust police officers, especially in the absence of footage disproving their testimony. As courts reopen and convene juries, many of the same officers now confronting protesters in the street will get back on the stand.
> Defense attorneys around the country believe the practice is ubiquitous; while that belief might seem self-serving, it is borne out by footage captured on smartphones and surveillance cameras. Yet those best positioned to crack down on testilying, police chiefs and prosecutors, have done little or nothing to stop it in most of the country. Prosecutors rely on officer testimony, true or not, to secure convictions, and merely acknowledging the problem would require the government to admit that there is almost never real punishment for police perjury.
Police and DAs, the parties who do most of the investigating of police perjury, are not exactly eager to share their internal findings for reasons we can probably guess, but the article does offer one striking anecdote:
> One NYPD officer, David Grieco—commonly known as Bullethead—has been sued at least 32 times, costing the city $343,252, for civil rights violations, including excessive force and fabrication of evidence. Yet Grieco was promoted and prosecutors continued to call him to the stand long after a slew of his victims blew the whistle on his violent and lawless behavior. Judges continued to rely on his word to lock up defendants. And Grieco’s name did not appear on Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez’s long-secret list of officers with known credibility problems.
Police lie during questioning as a tactic.
Selectively enforcing crimes is very common
My layman belief is that this isn’t just a law and order issue. Its a cultural dysfunction.
The criminal is excused because he doesn't know any better, those that defend themselves are punished to the fullest extent because it's politically expedient to do so.
2. Comparison with China is not accurate. a) Can't trust numbers from China and b) China has a much more rigid social structure and rules and the population has been beaten in submission (e.g. make pie Tiananmen square). Imagine a visa system that prevents folks from California from migrating to Texas (we are even for allowing mass migration from outside).
Even Politifact rates such comparisons false https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2014/dec/16/matthew-co...
It is better looking at a local level. And here China exceeds the US. https://apnews.com/article/china-prisons-uyghurs-religion-0d...
3) If this is really not a problem with Baltimore (as you imply), other locations with Kias and Hyundias should also be suing them. As far as I know, they are also sold in China but don't have these issues.
California has 39mil inhabitants, currently has 97k in prison.
Germany has 83mil inhabitants, currently 56k in prison.
Most Americans are only presented with increasing incarceration rates as the only realistically viable way of solving most social ills. As such, there are many flavors and colors of “increase the incarceration rate” across the political spectrum, and lots of people will pick a boogeyman (drug addicts, thieves, etc.) to justify it. For those that don’t pick a boogeyman their support of increasing the incarceration rate is tied to something entirely unrelated (e.g. “My guy that supports mass incarceration is so much better than your guy that supports mass incarceration! Look at his track record on {social issue}!”)
The fact that this is the view shared by the majority is reflected in the barely-fluctuating incarceration rate and military-sized “crime fighting” budgets. It is also a fact that is reflected in who Americans continue to elect and which policies we vote to enact.
- don't understand the origin of crime
- own stock in those private companies that run prisons (capitalism at its worse)
The US is ofcourse rich enough to do it but that would require scrapping every single tax cut since Reagan. Which would inconvenience those in the upper strata of society.
This is an apple & orange measure. Starting from first principles, that is how people behave in society, we can at least temper superficial reading of bare metrics.
Human beings self police under surveillance. This is the entire point of setting up surveillance states. US in contrast tends more towards police state: show of force to partition society in distinct 'social climates', directly informed by economic means.
So, yes, a police state will attempt to partition, even to the extremity of incarceration, and a surveillance state (which is a super-set of police-state) applies psychological force and thus has a much reduced subset that it will deem 'problematic'. Ideally, a state like China will like to approach the limit of having every 'citizen' well trained and well behaved, as domesticated humans.
Our problem over here is (given a generous disposition) that we struggle with reconciling freedom and order without resorting to brainwashing the population, or (less generously) that structural characteristic of our system where "freedom" is bound with at times grotesque wealth disparities naturally creates social hostility, and the economic incentives of a criminal life.
The problem with the USA’s prison system is that it doesn’t focus on rehabilitation at all and instead focuses on punishment. We get the exact results expected of such a system, which is a lot of repeat business.
There were very few long term prisoners in medieval society, not because of a progressive outlook but because most crimes were punished with some form of torture, execution, or both. Also, many things were crimes that now are thought of as basic human rights. You can have small prison population if your are willing to truly brutalize your population.
China performs about half of the execution in the world every year, is known to torture dissidents, and I doubt it reports those being re-educated as prisoners. I would hardly consider that more just than America.
A society can also have a small inmate population and be unjust because enforcement is rare, or selective either due to corrupt or ineffective law enforcement. Additionally if acts of vigilantism are common in a society you can have also have less prisoners since "justice" is found in the streets.
I think there are reasonable critiques of the American prisons, criminal justice system, and especially for profit prisons, but there are also much worse alternatives. The system we have really is an imperfect attempt in need of adjustment and not a deliberate attempt at cruelty. The cruelty is a bug not the feature.
The more crime, the more criminals. The more criminals, the more prisoners.
The tired trope that the US incarcerates so many non-violent criminals is just that, a trope. It's not based in reality. You could let out every single non-trafficking drug offense today and you wouldn't make a noticeable dent in the prison population at all. Drop that down to all non-violent offenses and it's not much better. At this point it's an outright lie when people bring this topic up, it's not simply being misinformed any longer.
The fact is US society is far more violent than many others it's compared to. There are many reasons that should be addressed, but we certainly do not have a problem of over incarceration of habitually violent criminals. Quite the opposite in fact. A very small percentage of people are responsible for the vast majority of the crime, and as a society we simply stopped caring bout their victims and let them roam free after dozens of interactions with law enforcement.
Then you have someone who is generally a decent citizen who makes a mistake and gets the entire book thrown at them - since they have something to lose and it's not politically dangerous.
This is a problem in the US. Hand-waving it away as saying American's simply want to jail everyone is silly. Live in some of these urban neighborhoods and tell me with a straight face you don't want more people in prison. You will be astounded at the people left to simply walk the streets and terrorize others. Literally everyone in the community knows who they are but nothing at all is done about it.
Speaking of tired tropes...
> Live in some of these urban neighborhoods and tell me with a straight face you don't want more people in prison.
Since you asked, I've lived in Dallas, Baltimore and the Detroit metro. I can tell you with a straight face I don't want more people in prison.
>You will be astounded at the people left to simply walk the streets and terrorize others.
It's more like you will be astounded at how dramatized this is, you will not be terrorized walking down the street.
> It's not based in reality. You could let out every single non-trafficking drug offense today and you wouldn't make a noticeable dent in the prison population at all. Drop that down to all non-violent offenses and it's not much better. At this point it's an outright lie when people bring this topic up, it's not simply being misinformed any longer.
Source?
Homicide and incarceration rates per 100k people:
homicide | incarceration | incarceration/homicide
USA 6.4 | 505 | 79
China 0.5 | 119 | 238
Norway 0.6 | 55 | 92
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
Maybe they know almost nobody wants to steal their cars, so no need for anti theft tech :)
inherently a car that can easily be repaired can easily be stolen. the implication is that Baltimore does not want cars that can easily be modified so they cannot easily be stolen.
troubling to say the least. then again, baltimore isn't exactly the pinnacle of governance.
take the iphone for example, which are notoriously difficult to use if stolen. the result has been people tend not to steal iphones as much (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-19/how-an-ip...).
however the result is you have less control of your device. is this a worthy tradeoff?
Heck, just like an iPhone, let’s have all parts on a car from the headlamps to the door handles to the mirrors digitally paired together. That would stop theft, and any car maker who doesn’t do it is encouraging theft.
As to "all the parts on a car paired" - there is VIN etching. https://www.allstate.com/resources/allstate/attachments/tool...
The audio system has some semblance of paring.
Though with he KIA, this is more often dealing with use (e.g. joy riding) of the car rather than reselling it.
> Federal, state, and local law enforcement partners from across the United States executed a nationwide, coordinated takedown today of leaders and associates of a national network of thieves, dealers, and processors for their roles in conspiracies involving stolen catalytic converters sold to a metal refinery for tens of millions of dollars.
> ...
> They knowingly purchased stolen catalytic converters and, through a “de-canning” process, extracted the precious metal powders from the catalytic core. DG Auto sold the precious metal powders it processed from California and elsewhere to a metal refinery for over $545 million.
Ok, not quite melted down, but reduced to rather base components. They are not reused in the same form.
Yes,I do.
> imagine a car with screws on the door to be swapped, and another car without them. you don't think the car with the screws would be easier to steal?
I imagined that. Every car door I have ever interacted with had the screws on the hinges such that you could only access them with the door open. You could swap all of them. This is not a particularly good example you choose I am afraid.
You can design cars which are hard to repair and easy to steal, or one which is easy to repair and hard to steal.
Thing is nobody is asking Kia to do something unprecedented. All people are asking to be about as safe from stealing as cars from other manufacturers are.
> Thing is nobody is asking Kia to do something unprecedented. All people are asking to be about as safe from stealing as cars from other manufacturers are.
how about you just not buy kia. they'll figure it out. why people want to involve the government in everything is just beyond me.
You might as well argue that a car built to be human drivable is easier to steal since the human needs to be able to see the surroundings, and a car with glass windows is easier to break into than a steel box with some external camera and lidar modules.
Idk why people argue against this obvious fact. Things have trade offs and this is one of them. Of course you can design things to be repairable and minimize risk of theft, but if you didn’t care about that things could be even more accessible for modification if desired.
Well maybe tell me a single car model where the door cannot be taken off and a single source outside of yourself who claims this as an anti-theft feature.
> if you disagree with that then we have to agree to disagree.
I agree with you that welding the hinge of a door to the chassis would lower its repairability. I disagree that it would make it less likely to be stolen. Cars are not stolen by people walking off with their doors. Assuming that there is some means of ingress and egress enabling normal users to regularly enter the vehicle, that is the doors are not completely welded shut, thiefs will use that.
If you are making the point that a vehicle completely welded shut would be less repairable, and also less likely to be stolen I guess I have to agree with that. For some reason I don’t predict it to be a comercial success though.
Common vehicle anti-theft features include immobilisers, steering locks, coded key fobs, car alarms, kill switches. I don’t see that you have shown that these techniques make cars less repairable.
> how about you just not buy kia.
Consider it done.
> why people want to involve the government in everything is just beyond me
I can explain this part. People get their car stolen and they call the police to report it. They expect that the police will expend resources to find it and punish the thieves. Many in among these very comments have expressed that sentiment. That is where the government gets in the picture.
Or people fall victim of some other crime. Like they have a hit and run traffic accident, or someone smashes into their shop window with a car and drives away with stolen goods, or any number of other crimes. They report it to the police who investigates and realises that the criminals used a stolen car to facilitate their crime. Because a ready source of easily stolen cars is not just a headache for the people whose car have gone missing. It undermines the security and safety of others too. This is an other way how the government got involved.
Are you with me so far? Do you agree that people can and should report to the police when crimes have been commited against them?
Assuming that we are on the same page so far. Or at least that you are seeing my point even if you are not agreeing: what happens next is that the police looks at their statistics and sees that many of these crimes have their root in the shoddy safety practices of a particular car manufacturer. They see that it costs them a lot of money too. So they go and ask their own government paid lawyer and ask them if they can do something about this. And presumably said lawyer told them that yes they can do something about it, they can sue the car manufacturer for public nuisance.
That is how people reporting crimes leads to the police noticing a common theme in the crimes and that leads to the city suing the vehicle manufacturer. I hope that answers your question about how and why people got the government involved in this issue.