[m463]

I've noticed in my lifetime that a number of crimes have become ad-hoc decriminalized.

Smaller crimes like bicycle theft or small electronics are basically "who cares" to the police. Many police departments don't even do bicycle registrations anymore.

Even car theft has sort of fallen to insurance companies to take care of. A lot of people just want a police report to turn in to insurance so they can get a new car.

I don't know about serious crimes. Are people more often caught with lots of data and the erosion of privacy?

[Cthulhu_]

I'm sure they prefer to focus on bigger cases - why go with a single bike theft if they can investigate an organized bike theft and laundering organization? Why bother with a single phone theft if they find a warehouse full of stolen merchandise?

But yeah, that does mean a lot of petty crime goes unpunished. Stealing a bike here has become normalized - as in, "my bike got stolen, I need to get home so I'll just steal another". Mind you that's only possible with shoddy locks.

[Veen]

> Why bother with a single phone theft if they find a warehouse full of stolen merchandise?

Because many more people are affected by minor crime than major crime. In the UK, where the police's funding has been reduced significantly, it's next to impossible to get them to do anything for burglary and minor thefts (although they're quite reactive if you say something impolitic on Twitter).

[wongarsu]

> why go with a single bike theft

because of

> Stealing a bike here has become normalized - as in, "my bike got stolen, I need to get home so I'll just steal another"

There's three options:

1. We abolish ownership

2. Everyone is responsible for protecting his own stuff, resorting to vigilante justice if he finds the thief after the fact

3. The taxes we pay fund police and courts to bring justice.

Option 1 is a version of socialism, option 2 is anarchy, that only leaves us option 3 if we want capitalism.

[acoard]

>There's three options:

All your options assume a perfectly rational world. The world we have now is not one of those 3 options, but it exists. Things are often internally contradictory.

[Izkata]

There are capitalistic (albeit not thorough) versions of 1 - rentals [0] and services (Uber/etc)

[0] https://www.divvybikes.com/

[wongarsu]

On Rentals I would disagree. Most rentals today depend on 3: to reclaim the money from the original purchase they force every user to pay, using police and court system as the means to enforce that payment and to prevent theft. Maybe in an anarchy rentals would also be quite successful by centralizing the problem of keeping property safe.

Services like Uber are interesting because they essentially strive to eleminate ownership by eleminating the thing to be owned.