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Comment by tamimio | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I am personally against that as well. Enforcing laws is a police job, not the average citizen's, because they “supposedly” undergo certain training to do that. If everyone started acting like a police officer or reporting insignificant things, it would get chaotic, and it incentivizes people being hostile against each other. The only exception, in my opinion, is someone reporting something that’s substantially bad, like a homicide.

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reporting is not the same as policing. Telling the police about a crime is the norm. Then the police police based on the report.

when you start offering monetary rewards for non-serious crime reporting you end up where the number of reports will outrun the resources of the reviewers and eventually have someone be required to "protest" the report and claim they are innocent putting a burden on them rather than the burden being on the authorities to prove you've done something wrong first.

Look at things like DMCA reporting on youtube and how it can be abused.

What's this non serious crime you speak of? It certainly not theft and traffic violations. theft ruins people's lives. traffic violations get people killed. Since 2010, the number of people dying in car accidents has gone up 50% per capita

Theft / traffic violations / jaywalking / curfew breaking / or public intoxication type crimes can be handled by police directly - having an incentive program to have people go around recording and reporting this sort of crime if not the sort of world I want to live in.

Yes I want those type of crimes punished and enforcement, no I do not want the masses to be working in an "all seeing eye" capacity for that to take place.

If you can't understand that the nuance there then I won't have much to discuss with you.

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