[fzeroracer]

Legally doesn't mean anything in this scenario. What you should be doing is looking at how the police execute these things in practice.

Which is that typically the police don't give a single shit about stolen bikes or anything like that unless you're rich or, apparently, Facebook. The poor already have weaker property rights than the rich, because if they were to report their bikes as being stolen the police would scoff at them and continue doing jack shit. Or worse, if you're a minority.

And generally speaking, Facebook encouraging confrontations with the police which are historically very dangerous for minorities even if they've done absolutely nothing wrong is probably a bad idea.

[knzhou]

> Which is that typically the police don't give a single shit about stolen bikes or anything like that unless you're rich or, apparently, Facebook. The poor already have weaker property rights than the rich, because if they were to report their bikes as being stolen the police would scoff at them and continue doing jack shit. Or worse, if you're a minority.

This is just totally wrong. Police have scoffed at all property theft I've ever reported to them, and it wasn't due to malice, it was because doing anything about it was basically impossible. I suppose I could have demanded they spend 10 hours a week scanning Craigslist for my stuff, but that is a waste of time for them. The same applies to everybody I know who has had stuff stolen.

Facebook's bikes are different because they very obviously belong to Facebook and are clearly, visibly being used. It's like cattle branding, it makes it much easier to recover property.

[fzeroracer]

If you very obviously branded your bike so that it was completely and indistinguishably yours, do you think the police would bother to hunt down the person who stole your bike?

Because from my experience and knowledge, the answer to that would be a firm 'No'.

[knzhou]

I'm getting very confused with all of your comments. Do you want more policing of theft in poor communities, such as East Palo Alto, or less? I currently live in the rich part of Menlo Park (thank god for subsidized housing). Do you think there should be more policing of bike theft there, or less?

At some point, I thought your point was that more policing in poor communities was bad, because disparate impact on them is the problem. But later you seem to be saying that more policing in rich communities is the problem, because they get better service. And now you seem to be saying that actually, there isn't enough policing in my (rich) community. From my perspective your position has flipped three times.

[fzeroracer]

My position hasn't 'flipped' at all. I'll break it down into two points.

The first is that you claimed the police would do something about these thefts if the item was easily identifiable and visibly used. My counter argument is that even if you had a bike that was perfectly unique and identifiable, that the police wouldn't do anything unless you were wealthy and/or a corporation which has increased influence on them.

The second point is that Facebook attempting to police this behavior and bend the local police to its will has a net negative effect for the local population, because as the article points out, the police are racially profiling people in order to figure out if someone stole the bike or not, and are harassing/arresting people because of it.

You're trying to break down a complex argument into something black/white as 'more policing/less', which is also exactly what your original argument did in trying to play down the arguments the Vice article was bringing up. My point has been that it's never that simple, and allowing corporations or the rich to influence how the law is executed is a Bad Thing because it leads to two different classes of citizens when it comes to law enforcement.

[knzhou]

Thanks for clarifying. My response has two points as well.

The first is that thinking about "Facebook" as ordering more policing is misleading, because its influence in this case is not more than the 10,000 residents would have had individually. In any case, if there were 10,000 new residents in a town who experienced a lot of theft, they could band together to demand better police services, and you would expect more officers to be hired. I don't think there's a difference here if those residents are represented by a "community leader" or a Facebook HR employee. It's collective action either way, and its power fundamentally comes from people living in Menlo Park, not Facebook's valuation.

The second is that more or less policing of petty theft is always going to have a disproportionate impact on poorer communities, because people from such communities commit most of it. This is not a moral judgment or a talking point or anything else -- it is simply a fact, one which even the community leaders quoted in this article are perfectly aware of, despite trying to word around it.

This is the contradiction that I'm trying to point out here. There are many examples in this thread of middle/upper-middle class people experiencing property theft. The majority of the time, when you can track where the property went, it's a poorer community. So in your preferred situation where even individual, middle-class citizens can get the police to spend hours hounding down their stolen bikes, it would look a lot like richer people sending their police into poorer communities to "harass" the people there, which you also said was a bad result. To repeat, there is no way for police action against petty theft to fall equally on the rich and poor, because richer people don't need or want to do it in the first place. That's why I don't know what you actually want.

[LurkersWillLurk]

While I agree with the general premise that the police pay more attention to property crime affecting businesses rather than people, most people that own bikes don't 1) paint them in very identifiable colors, and 2) have GPS trackers built into them to aid recovery.

It's substantially easier for the police to find Facebook's bikes than a regular, unmarked bike; conversely, it's exceedingly difficult to recover a bike that has no tracking or special identifying features.

[ccvannorman]

This ^ ^ It's important to understand that yes, legal pedants are correct in "theft is theft", except that the police asymmetrically enforce it against the poor, no matter which side of the theft the poor is on.

[knzhou]

Elsewhere on this thread I'm being told by the asme poster than we need more policing of theft -- apparently, having less policing of theft in poor communities is the problem, because that means the rich get better police service.

This is the thing I can never understand in these debates: I never have the slightest clue whether the people I'm talking with want more policing or less. It seems to switch every few minutes.