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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. |
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.