On 9/19/2017 7:36 AM, Joerg wrote:

snip

Not lawless but police often won't do a thing about property crime. We
pay a ton of taxes but too much goes towards fat pensions and we get
little in return for it.

Last Saturday my daughter called me and was asking whether car insurance
covers broken windows. Well it wasn't her car, it was her clueless
roommate who, despite being told not to leave ANYTHING in her car, went
ahead and left stuff in her car. They stole her bicycle and her clothes
but for some reason left her Macbook. Thieves will break a window to get
two quarters, you leave NOTHING in your car around here. My former
colleague had her old car broken into and they stole the owner's manual.
My daughter said "well she thought because the house is in a good
neighborhood it would be safe." But of course the thieves don't target
bad neighborhoods where there is nothing to steal, of course they target
"good neighborhoods."

The police in big cities are so busy with homicides and other felonies
that they are obviously not going to investigate the theft of a bicycle
light or other part or accessory of a bicycle. We probably don't want to
pay more taxes to hire more police and build more prisons, at $75K per
year per inmate (not including construction costs), to lock up thieves
that steal a bicycle bell, while letting white-collar criminals off
scot-free.

My neighbor was a cop for 25 years. He said that getting police to do
anything about property crime is very difficult. If your car is stolen,
and you have a LojackⓇ, even getting the police to go to where the car
is is damn near impossible. That may be why the insurance discount is
minuscule. I installed a "poor man's LojackⓇ" in my daughter's new car.
It can be tracked by her (or me), and it was only $100, and has no
monthly fees. But with an insurance discount of only $7 every six
months, it would take 8 years to break even.

Don't insult cops because they get a good pension. It's very hard to
recruit cops, and the pension is the big attraction because the salaries
are not great, and it's a risky profession. San Jose tried cutting their
police pensions and it resulted in a huge exodus of cops to other
cities, even though San Jose had higher police salaries. Bad move since
the acquisition and training costs of new cops is high.