[PointyDog]

I lived in Howard County for a year. With the combination of county income tax and affluent property taxes, every service was exceptionally well funded.

Having lived in Mountain View & Sunnyvale, CA as well for a decade my experience was Howard County itself had quicker and better services than those cities.

It doesn't surprise me at all that their police department is competent and helpful.

[segmondy]

Exactly this. Since there's less crime in affluent areas, the police actually have time to investigate what get's ignored in other areas. By also solving these crimes, it tells the criminals to avoid those areas, it's kind of a feedback loop.

[xeromal]

It's also this way in smaller towns. I live in a small north GA town and you can ask the cops to come by your house during the holidays to see if anyone has broke in. Cops here are much more useful than when I'm in SoCal where I could even get cops to show up within an hour when a hit and run caused me to crash into someones back yard and total my car.

[Fatnino]

When I was in SoCal some vandals broke into the construction site next door. We saw them. Breaking things and spraying graffiti etc.

Called the cops. They responded by sending a helicopter over 15 minutes later. It shined it's spotlight around for a moment and then flew away.

"job well done" - LAPD probably.

[alsetmusic]

Oakland has non-emergency 911 calls redirect to file online. It’s certainly a problem when crime outstrips resources.

[kbos87]

I'll offer a counterpoint - I live in a nice building in a bit of a rougher part of a major city. I've learned that the police do show up thankfully, but it takes a very long time unless there's literally a life on the line. (Which, I know, is better than some other major cities.)

The couple of times I've interacted with them, it's been painfully obvious to me that they feel like they need to put on a performance for me, even if it's clear that it's an unsolvable crime. (In both cases, it was a property crime worth reporting, but also one with literally no evidence to follow up on.) I honestly wonder if some of the less well resourced people in my neighborhood even get a similar time of day from the police - my impression is that they probably don't.

[hcknwscommenter]

Given that 99% of the crimes are committed by repeat offenders, a simple dusting for fingerprints (costs pennies) could likely identify the culprit. But they don't bother. And they act like we've seen too many movies/tv shows. But when an "interesting" crime happens they do in fact dust for fingerprints (cheap!) and do all sorts of swabbing and testing (expensive). The police are lazy in CA especially. And yet they are also extremely well paid in CA. Someday, hopefully, this will change.

[sokoloff]

> simple dusting for fingerprints (costs pennies)

If a cop is making $30/hr, and we allow "pennies" to be as much as $0.25, they would have to complete the entire dusting for fingerprints process in 30 seconds.

[Spooky23]

Remember the DA is part of the equation. For low priority crime, there’s a lot of risk with using fingerprints. They won’t take a case they may not win.

[mcny]

I’m not holding my breath. Things won’t change until there’s a price to pay for corruption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Smith

[ForOldHack]

There is so much more:

https://www.kqed.org/news/11988510/case-of-former-san-jose-p...

[Angostura]

The dust isn’t the expensive bit

[sharpy]

Or different departments pushing responsibility to each other...

I had a break in. Thieves took my check books, and tried to cash one in at a payday loan place at a neighbouring city. The payday place called me, and of course, I told them not to.

I called my police department with additional information, and they told me to file a report in the neighbouring city instead... And of course, the other police department told me to file with my police department as the original crime did not take place in their city...

And oh, I also had airtags that were taken so I knew which building the thieves took my stuff to. But because it is a multi-tenant building, the police wouldn't do anything. I offered to trigger the sound to narrow it down, but they didn't allow that either... Eventually, the thieves found the airtags and threw them out.

Anyway, I contacted my representatives to give police more help to help in cases like mine, but crickets is what I heard back. Not even an acknowledgement.

[LorenPechtel]

Yeah, search warrants require probable cause to search a specific place. Air tags and the like are simply not accurate enough to pinpoint a specific unit in dense areas. I think the real answer here is to change how search warrants work: Allow a judge to approve a warrant for wherever the tag is--the police show up with equipment that can localize the tag. They do so in the least invasive manner they can, but the warrant gives them the power to go wherever the tag leads them.

[jorvi]

There is a very simple hack to that: tell the police that you think you saw the perpetrator and are going to beat the hell out of them.

The same thing works with stolen goods tracked via AirTags: the police will almost laugh in your face when you request their help with retrieving the gear, but if you call the police (not 911) and tell them you are about to confront the thief in a physical altercation, they’ll be there within five minutes.

[wdb]

Yeah, fingerprinting and report that’s what they did when my house got broken into in Westminster London.

[deadbabe]

Is there a map of police response times somewhere? Sounds like this would make a good proxy for a map of affluent areas and would be useful for getting directions and stuff that avoid bad areas when you’re in unfamiliar places.

[ForOldHack]

Just think of it: I say a car getting a parking ticket, while thieves were removing its catalytic converter. The dystopian future of having to pay cash for police services is closer than you consider, or even think. The "Community liaison" who showed up simply said "That is not their job."

[Gibbon1]

I over use the word but the idea that property crimes are merely a matter for the insurance company is the most neoliberal thing ever.

You can imagine an alternative system where if someone steals your cat the government has to pay for that.

[juliushuijnk]

Useful for criminals too. Come to think of it, a serious large sized criminal org would probably have such a map internally. And since there are more orgs like that, there is probably such a map-as-a-service somewhere for those in the know.

[luma]

Are we still talking about the police in the OP? Who needed someone to give them GPS coordinates to find the stolen goods after at least 14,999 previous tool thefts went unsolved?

Not exactly batman level detective work here, this case was cracked because it was handed to them on a silver platter.

[Workaccount2]

I guess you haven't dealt much with the police before...

[luma]

Oh I have which I why I'm surprised that everyone is reading this as the police doing a good job. This is a story of the police failing to do their job 14,999 times and only getting it right on try 15,000 because one of the victims solved the case for them.

[seanmcdirmid]

It helps if there are less affluent areas nearby where police are more overworked, as it easily shifts the problem to those areas instead. For example, King county in the Seattle area is notorious for not locking criminals up, but as long as Bellevue police send a bunch of cops to each incident, no longer how small, detain people and even send them to jail (even if they are quickly released), it’s enough of a disincentive to send the problem back to Seattle or to southern suburbs where police don’t have time for that.

[hangonhn]

My buddy got his bike stolen in Mountain View. Not only did the police find his bike they also arrested the thief.

Another buddy was woken up one night by a drunken stranger pounding on his door. He called the MVPD and within 5 minutes 3 squad cars showed up.

I used to live in Dallas. One night an entire floor of cars parked in my apartment garage was broken into. I called the police and reported it. Then I asked when they're coming and if I should stick around to wait for them. They told me they're not coming. The next night, the thieves returned and broke into all the cars on the next garage level.

Funding really matters. Mountain View is one of the handful of cities in the country with a triple-A municipal bond rating.

[AceJohnny2]

> Mountain View is one of the handful of cities in the country with a triple-A municipal bond rating.

Having Google headquartered there probably helped their finances.

[Tempest1981]

Mountain View implemented a business tax of $150 per employee per year in 2020, bringing in $3.3 million per year from Google.

It's a struggle for cities to pass/raise business taxes... the businesses threaten to leave, and the cities back down.

[jonathankoren]

I'm sure your anecdotal experience is true for you, but funding is not linked to clearance rates. Counter to copaganda, police are worse at solving cases compared to 30 years ago, even as crime rates have fallen dramatically and funding has increased.

If you think preventing and solving crimes, then American police are objectively bad at their jobs. If you think of police as revenue generators, then they're good at it. Because the police spend all their time on things like traffic citations. Even the police unions occasionally say the quite part out loud, like when the NYPD union famously said that they would not arrest anyone "unless absolutely necessary". Unsurprisingly to people that have looked into policing, crime doesn't increase during police work slowdowns.

[Hnrobert42]

It’s sorta hard to trust that your data is unbiased fact when you use the term “copaganda.”

[jonathankoren]

I mean, if you weren't smugly comfortable in your biases, you could always just do a search, say for "FBI crime rate by year", or "police clearance rates by year", or "police funding per year", but I guess not.

[j16sdiz]

It is different on fed level, state level and City level.

[jonathankoren]

Not really

[fragmede]

that has nothing to do with the fact that using that word causes people to stop listening to you

[paulmd]

weee wooo weee wooo here comes the tone police!

(if only real cops could get that kind of response time/clearance rate!)

like that’s just a shitty argument yourself, you lost the argument on the facts so you’re complaining about how the presentation. Lazy argumentation, it’s a way to attack the messenger(‘s presentation) instead of addressing the argument.

It’s the highbrow version of “minor spelling mistake!!!!”.

[hluska]

I just asked this question and I’ll ask it again. Why be so combative? You wrote the sound of a siren - that’s overly combative.

Fucking chill. This is a website, few of us are politicians and our opinions barely matter.

[hluska]

Are you saying that police should arrest people when it’s not necessary? How do you figure that?

[DFHippie]

It's the cops who said that. I assume that's why the phrase is in quotes. Apparently they themselves believed they performed some arrests that weren't "absolutely necessary". They said this as a threat to influence negotiations. You should take this question up with them.

[Spooky23]

NYPD is an MBA style police agency. The management wants to hit their KPIs.

If the bosses want jaywalking tickets, they swarm like bees. Arresting someone for robbery fucks up the metric for the local commander.

It’s like any big dumb company. The officers are like salesmen, and they are trained to do whatever bullshit the boss wants.

[hluska]

Why be combative? I was curious about a statement and wanted to learn.

But seriously, why he combative? People used to be able to ask questions without being told to take it up with the NYPD. The entire world wants to fight and frankly, it’s embarrassing.

[1024core]

You will find similar pockets of responsive police in areas like Piedmont (in Oakland), Atherton, Hillsborough, etc.

[codezero]

The Atherton police reports are hilarious. I can't find the site readily, but I remember reading some of them when I worked in Mountain View. Things like calling the police because landscapers are mowing the lawn loudly, or because there's someone dressed as Santa Claus walking down a sidewalk.

edit: found it, the Santa line made it easy to search for lol: https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/08/27/the-best-of-atherton-...

Some highlights

  A resident reported a large light in the sky. It was the moon.
  A man was reported to be lying on the ground, possibly writing.

[talldatethrow]

Kensington Police (near Berkeley) knew me, my car, and my two motorcycles just on a semi friendly basis. I didn't live there. I was just dating a girl who lived there her whole life.

Small town life exists even in major metro areas if you're wealthy.

[bhawks]

Howard county has roughly half the population of San Mateo county and roughly half the budget. Attributing the difference solely to government funding seems challenging.

[ForOldHack]

You want to go there? Without facts?

https://policescorecard.org/md/police-department/howard-coun...

[trolan]

Sunnyvale and Mountainview both score lower