[ballenf]

You’re probably right, but we can probably all agree there is a line somewhere that we don’t want police crossing with regard to baiting criminal activity.

I’d just rather us not have to debate where the line should be and be ever vigilant as police push the boundaries.

[logfromblammo]

In the traditional crime triangle of motive, method, and opportunity, baiting and trapping artificially supplies the opportunity, and in some cases also the method, such that crimes that would not normally occur take place in such a way that it is easier to prosecute them than the naturally occurring crimes.

It replaces the pursuit and prosecution of people who have committed crimes in the community with jamming up all the usual suspects.

It's lazy, and it takes resources away from victims waiting for satisfaction. "Sorry, we aren't going to look for the person who robbed you, but we arrested 30 folks who are criminally predisposed to do exactly the same crime against cars similar to yours, if they're parked nearby, with unlocked doors, and pawnable valuables easily detectable inside. One of them might even be the person who robbed you! We're not going to check, of course, but you can maybe pretend that we caught them, to make yourself feel better."

Instead of setting a bait car, and watching just that one while it's out, watch over as many cars as possible to detect and prevent break-ins, all the time--as the community expects its police to do, to earn their pay.

It may be effective in the short term, but it also undermines community trust in the justice system, which is critical for policing to be effective in the long term. If you round up and persecute all the usual suspects at regular intervals, their friends and family will stop helping you, and start shunning you whenever you come 'round to "help".

[UnFleshedOne]

Another word for "lazy" is "efficient".

I'd think people stealing bait cars are often the same people who would be stealing regular cars. So a successful bait car protects one or more regular cars. It is important to solve crimes that happened, but it is even more important to prevent future crimes. In fact, for property crimes, the overwhelming benefit of solving them is preventing future crimes. Except in backward countries with retributive justice system, like US, I suppose. (I want the guy who robbed me to suffer!)

Otherwise we, as a society, would simply get collective insurance to make victims whole and simply ignore property crimes.

Bait cars protect other cars as well, police is advertising their presence often, so everybody knows they are there. That has a chilling effect on crimes of opportunity.

In fact you don't even need to have any bait cars at a given location to reduce crimes, just say you do.

Would you be ok with private citizens, en masse, installing GPS trackers in their belongings, turning _all_ cars into bait cars btw? Would that also be considered entrapment?

[logfromblammo]

I don't agree with some of your premises, there.

Efficient is often lazy, but lazy is not always efficient. If the specific implementation of lazy is doing a different-but-similar job, rather than a different method for getting the same results, that isn't efficiency, it's substitution.

Preventing future crimes is important, but that is not the public mandate for police. Police are there to investigate crimes that occurred, collect the evidence, locate and arrest the suspects, and then turn everything over to the courts for further resolution. Future crime prevention is the responsibility of everyone living in civilization, in part by implementing security infrastructure under the control of those most directly impacted by the crimes in question. People want to feel safe, but not watched. It's not security, if the implementation makes you nervous about how it will be used.

Yes, I would be okay with private citizens, en masse, installing anti-theft devices in their belongings, provided that the tracking is under the control of the device owner. That's not bait, it's just another security measure. If it doesn't have a hook in it, it's just fish food; some worms get eaten, and others do not. You can't save them by taking a dozen fish out of the lake. They save themselves by developing camouflage, or a bitter toxin, or sharp spines, or slippery slime--whatever it takes to ward off the fish. Meanwhile, the anglers continue to use the bait that catches the most fish. They aren't out to protect worms; they just want to catch fish.

Another problem, of course, is that people already do that, with services such as LoJack, Prey, and Find My iPhone. When the owners take the location evidence to police, they do not always do anything with it. Someone can give a cop exact GPS coordinates, including elevation, with video recorded from their laptop with a clear image of the thief's face, and see no action. A television journalist can go to the thief's house, with cameras rolling, get a complete confession, air it on a national news program, and still not recover the property or see an indictment. Cops do not have a legal obligation to do anything for any particular person, as affirmed by several federal circuits independently, and then the Supreme Court. And private citizens and journalists do not produce a clean chain of evidence custody. The cops who don't pursue real property crimes that are trivially easy to resolve are being non-efficiently lazy, by doing an easier job.

As long as the priority is on bait vehicles and drug-related civil forfeitures and parallel constructions and other bastardizations of Peelian policing, the cops are not making the public feel secure in their liberties and possessions. They are not being what we wish them to be, and not doing what we would willingly pay them to do.

[UnFleshedOne]

I agree with most of your post, except police mandate part (at least on paper, implementations vary). Prevention is explicitly in public mandate of Edmonton police (first thing I found). If you look at other programs police departments sometimes have (like public outreach about securing belongings and so on), it is mainly about reducing crimes of opportunity before they happen, and only partially PR.

And that bait cars are in the same category with civil forfeitures and other things you listed.

We have police exactly so we don't have to grow slimy toxic spines ourselves. Places with weak rule of law can get by with Honor culture for example, but that has a cost.

Anglers might not be out to protect worms, but they can destroy fish populations just fine nevertheless, most lakes need to be stoked in fact.

As for not pursuing real property crimes with digital evidence, that is often a question of not having a process and infrastructure for that and balancing time spent with likelihood of getting enough for convicting. Standards for admissible evidence are there for a reason, and relaxing them would give much more power to police than to private citizens. This is going to be much worse soon, when deepfakes become popular.

[UnFleshedOne]

I agree, and we do have a line, sting operations are not lawful already. I just don't think passive baiting crosses that line.

Active baiting is different, there police would be introducing the same forces that create criminals in the first place.