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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Is crime low because everyone is so well off it’s pointless to steal a bike? Or more social norms and culture like Japan?

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Crime seems sufficiently low that police have bandwidth to deal with more petty crimes. However I would not expect an unlocked bicycle to be safe, there is still quite a bit of bike theft. But I would expect a simple lock to be enough, most of the time.

Similarly with motorbikes: steering lock seems to be enough, judging by the lack of extra security I see on other bikes.

It's because the little crime there is will be taken very seriously. Police will investigate your missing bike. And yes, culture and social expectations.

> Police will investigate your missing bike.

They most certainly will not. They won't generally investigate property-related theft and crimes, including non-violent home break-ins. They just issue an incident report for your insurance and that's the end of it.

That‘s a good one. They write down your frame number and tell you they get back to you. Then you never hear from them again.

They definitely won’t investigate your missing bike unless it is a really valuable one. If you would have any experience living in the country you would know that’s absolutely not true. We also don’t have a single police, it’s handled at the canton level and they can be drastically different.

Well, it depends of course, but in general police presence is way more attentive to "smaller" issues than in neighboring countries. As for experience, I have been living in CH for almost 20 years now.

Its just not true. Bikes get stolen a lot even when they are locked. But There is not a lot of violent crime in Switzerland, so you can walk around everywhere without any worries.

> Is crime low because everyone is so well off

Apparently it's a controversial statement for some folks, but yes, having good material conditions basically makes it stupid to commit crimes.

Why would you risk your life or your freedom for some quick bucks when you can enjoy social comfort and 5 weeks of guaranteed vacations per year?

You can thank trade unions for that lifestyle. They fought very hard until very recently. Nowadays it's getting tougher for them and for all of us for sure...

Not everyone is well off in Switzerland, the country is relatively rich and lots of rich people moved there but the wealth isn’t distributed equally among the population. It’s not necessarily as visible as other countries due to the low density.

The vast majority of people couldn’t afford to live in Zurich or Geneva.

Adults bikes get stolen, a lot. But kids bike almost never because there is no money to be made selling kids bikes.[1]

[1] I mean the regular department store kids bike, not some kids specific high end mountain bike some people would buy for their kids.

Switzerland is very expensive. A stolen bike won’t bring you much money by local standards (and the crime will be investigated by police).

I spent some time in Zurich and at this point it's not measurably more expensive than SF and parts of south bay yet here we are

Not that much more than NYC or SF to be honest, I've traveled to all three in the past year and spent more money in NYC than I did in Geneva for the same amount of time (around 4 days in each).

>and the crime will be investigated by police

nope.

Well, I reported my stolen scooter to the police. They haven’t found it, but the case is open! And they helped me in other cases.

Low crime and being well off, along with good social norms and culture, likely all go together and come as a collection of traits of certain groups of people.

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