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Funny enough, I had some valuable stuff (including my passport!) stolen from my car, which I'd left unlocked because I was moving some heavy boxes. The police in my area (bay area) said they couldn't really do anything about it because they didn't break a window.

I don't know exactly what legal technicalities are involved, but this did actually happen to me in a de facto sense!

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That's cops being lazy because they now don't need to write a report for your car insurance to replace the non-broken window. However, your homeowners or renters insurance may cover the stolen items. In general, there's probably nothing to do about stolen items from a car because literally anyone could have done it and it's not like your car was a sterile environment to begin with (millions of fingerprints and pieces of random DNA everywhere). To give them the benefit of the doubt, why should they expel manpower and resources over items that your insurance will replace when those resources could be put to use in investigating violent crimes? Although in reality, even with photographic evidence and location tracking of the stolen items, the cops still probably won't do anything other than write a report unless it's a very slow day.

Yeah, what this anecdote actually proves is that there's no legal protection against the cops just deciding not to do their jobs.

The supreme court doubly proved that again recently ruling that the police have no specific duty to protect individuals or even respond for that matter.

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