[vineyardmike]

> property crime is very common and not prosecuted.

Honestly, and perhaps controversially, I think this is not a super bad thing. Yeah getting your stuff stolen sucks, but at a society level it’s not a big deal.

I had my car broken into in Seattle in a hotel parking lot. The hotel staff cleaned up the glass, but otherwise didn’t tell us. When we found the car, we notified the police - in Seattle this means filling out a form on their website. They automatically email you a police report to forward to insurance. I’m very confident no one in SPD was involved. We had insurance money that day and the car fixed a few days later. Between the window repair and the items stolen was probably ~$1500 in damage. But the cost of a police officer to spend hours investigating (and still probably not catching anyone) would make it prohibitively expensive to run a police force. Unless you want to put up cameras everywhere and staff the government to track people through them, you basically can’t prevent petty crime in cities. Even that may not have caught our thief. It’s just too expensive to police everything, and with so much police corruption, I’m not sure I’d prefer 3x the force at 1/3 the salary.