[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.