>Thieves and other "bad actors" are often a consequence of deeper underlying problems. People don't tend to steal that much when they are economically comfortable.
As time goes on I believe this less and less. I don't even think it's supported by the data. Spain or Sweden have way more thefts per capita than, say, Poland. Am I to believe a poor person is better of in Poland than in Spain or Sweden? They literally freeze to death sometimes.
I'm Spanish, I remember visiting Helsinki and finding toys in a wooden trunk in a small park for children. My first thought was "How is nobody stealing these?" and the second, immediate thought was how utterly sad the first one was. Am I to believe it's poverty pushing people to steal children's toys?
I think social cohesion is a factor often ignored, which is amazing in a way because it gets alluded to all the time, "They are tourists, who cares?", "Yeah but that guy is rich", "it's a supermarket", "They have insurance", "they are non-gypsies". Any of these has an implied "I don't care about that person because...". And this generates a feedback loop. It's harder to care about other people and have sympathy for them when you don't trust anyone not to steal your stuff if you leave it unattended for five minutes.
In retrospect, I do think those toys got "stolen" frequently, just because children grab stuff all the time and I'm sure it ended up lost more than once, but there must be an insistence to trust your fellow man, to trust that if a good is lost there must be a good reason. I don't think we have that trust anymore.