[bmitc]

> It is an immense failure of law enforcement to not crack down harder on widespread scams.

I fully agree. My identity was stolen and used to sign up for retail credit cards in a spree, and I even did the research for them. I had a timestamp of purchase, the items purchased, and the cash register number. The police could not care less. For one, they are lazy as hell and throw up jurisdictions as an excuse. The mere fact that the thief seemingly only used one store per jurisdiction seemed almost intentional in terms of taking advantage of this. The total amount stolen was $9,000, but I don't think the police gave it a second thought after I contacted them, and this was in a city big enough that had a financial crimes department.

[shuckles]

I worked briefly for a financial crimes prevention organization, and the minimum dollar amount of loss we could get police to act on was over $100,000. We would do all the research and present them with a complete case.

[oatmeal1]

> For one, they are lazy as hell

How do you know they are lazy and don't just have an excessive # of crimes to handle?

[iudqnolq]

The cops have a pervasive misallocation of resources from the top down.

For example, US police eventually come up with enough evidence for prosecutors to start proceedings only in about 50% of murder cases [1]. Yet police departments spend very little of their time working on murder cases. [2]

Assuming you believe police investigating murders is valuable, I don't see how you can think police should be wasting time on broken taillight stops when they're failing that badly at it. (If the cops can't be reassigned they should be fired and their salaries used to pay cops who can)

[1] Technically I'm describing the murder clearance rate, but I use this phrasing to avoid the common and incorrect implication that a cleared murder means it's necessary actually "solved"

[2] There's no great metric for this. Assuming a police officer who just filed an incident report about a traffic stop for a broken taillight probably wasn't working on a murder case immediately before we can use incident reporting data. For ex, https://data.sfgov.org/d/wg3w-h783/visualization

[bmitc]

Because I communicated with them.

[nyc_data_geek1]

Have you ever met and spoken at length with a cop? They're #1 concern is billing enough overtime and securing a cushy gig

[askiiart]

I won't imply any opinions here, because this is far outside my realm of knowledge, but I will say that a sample size of 1 isn't too good.