Comment by Gigachad
1 day ago
Tbh solving this is one of the actual use cases for things like flock cameras.
Simply bolting things down harder is still defeated by a battery powered grinder.
1 day ago
Tbh solving this is one of the actual use cases for things like flock cameras.
Simply bolting things down harder is still defeated by a battery powered grinder.
Theft is solved by making society better, not worse. Make people not want or reliant upon crime to survive.
No one relies on bike theft to "survive".
No one goes around stealing bikes just because they want to do bad things.
9 replies →
What are you basing that on?
That's right, people steal bikes because they are inherently evil and want to make baby Jesus cry.
I think it's ok to define "survive" as an addict who needs (<-also loosely defined) a fix.
You don't generally commit serious white collar crime, tax fraud or do crypto grifts to survive. For petty street crime, I don't really see any other motivation.
2 replies →
"reliant upon crime to survive"
Do we have any sources that people are stealing to survive? What definition of surviving are we using here?
> Theft is solved by making society better, not worse.
Phew, good to hear. Here I thought it would be a hard and complex problem, with lots of unknown unknowns, difficult political compromises, a generation-spanning efforts and many potential solutions with uncertain outcomes, partially contradicting each other.
Instead, we just have to make society better. So, what's step 1?
Step 1 could be not turning the world into a an Orwellian nightmare and outlawing mass surveillance, from both government and private corporations.
And if you are still worried about theft in the mean time, you could try looking at wage thefts which has a value greater than all other forms of theft combined.
1 reply →
Repeat after me "Criminals are not Alladin"
It's actually solved by putting thieves in prison (by the help of flock cameras).
Prisons are full. We have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. No cops, prosecutors, or judges are interested in putting a bike thief in prison. We've just decided it's an acceptable cost in our society. It's another reason that cycling is not a useable mode of transport in many places: if you don't have a secure/indoor place to put your bike at work or while shopping, it will get stolen. So you either ride bikes that you can afford to lose, which sucks if you have to go any real distance, or you drive.
Is it though? Does prison work as a deterrence to others?
There's usually a fairly small number of criminals in the population and they have short careers. Otherwise, the whole enterprise of society wouldn't be viable.
So once you take them off the streets for a couple of years, or decades for the more hardened ones, it's fine. It has an added benefit of breaking criminal networks so the future adepts have no place to fence the stolen goods.
6 replies →
The idea is that it lowers the number of thieves.
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Where I live that’s a win win for thieves. Earn money stealing a bike, have a roof over your head and free food.
Police here don’t even care to help if your car is stolen and you have GPS on it. Cameras and jail do nothing to help protect your property if the police refuse to work.
"here"? We don't know where you are.
In the UK police will ask the value of the property stolen and use that to decide whether to do anything. Low-value is under a few £k.
1 reply →
Aside from the fact that there's little to no actual evidence (not funded by flock cherry-picking, and doing a lot of extremely thin correlation/causation nonsense...
No, it's actually solved by providing social safety net programs and managing the economy to have entry level accessible jobs that pay a living wage. People steal because they run out of other options. The cost of flock contracts would be far better spent on food pantries, job counseling, emergency housing...
There is nearly zero correlation between the number of police and the amount of crime.
You don’t gotta be impossible to steal from, you just gotta be more annoying to steal from than the next guy.
I learned this. I had what I thought was a pretty good lock, but the chain was cut very clean. The cut was almost perfect flat, so I assume they used a power tool.
They will still steal your seat, lights, wheel, and any other bit they can get.
Sure you can use all number of locks, security bolts, and stripping the bike down yourself every time you leave it, but it’s sucks. You’d rather public spaces just be safe.
Just follow the old Eve online adage - don't fly what you can't afford to lose.
If there's lot of theft and you can't store bike at a secure place - have a cheap bike.
3 replies →
Well said by somebody who's very obviously never used a bicycle as their primary mode of transportation ;)
Cameras don't solve crimes, Flock or otherwise, unless the cops consider the crime serious. It is almost universal that cops don't consider bike theft serious. This is beginning to change in a few cities but not most.
From what I can tell, they are mostly fully occupied with dealing with emergency situations and domestic violence calls. There isn’t the resources allocated to searching for bikes. Especially when there often isn’t much to go off.
Making the search process easier makes locating stolen stuff becomes more of an office job that’s cheaper to do so the math works out better.
They could solve hundreds of stolen bike reports by just visiting the homeless encampments and running the serial numbers of every bike there. They arent interested, or think the optics are bad.
UK has ton of cameras, still plenty of thieving. You're solving wrong problem by solution that WILL be used against you the second govt takes wrong(er) turn
But Google's AI told me that Flock cameras are full of gold, so I steal those instead of bikes!
https://www.techspot.com/news/113381-google-ai-told-people-f...
AngryData> No one goes around stealing bikes just because they want to do bad things.
But people go around stealing Flock cameras because they want to do good things.