Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 141 posts

Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief

#71

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jghn wrote: post #65
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pulling over a citizen with a job and citing them for speeding is a much more lucrative use of their time The solution may be in segregating the police from the traffic cops. Policework is dangerous and specialised. Its officers need a lot of training and good pay. Traffic cops are basically humans trained to be cameras, inasmuchas 90% of what they do can be automated.

> Policework is dangerous Not nearly as much as people believe. Most lists of dangerous jobs in the US have police below jobs most people consider to be pretty mundane. For instance, this list [1] ranks it at #22. Below occupations like "garbage collector" and "crossing guard" [1] https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-j...

> Not nearly as much as people believe

The point is a lot of what police in our country do is not police work. It's traffic copping and meter maiding.

Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief

#72

Post by bsimpson »

1propionyl wrote: post #54

I'm glad the sheriff actually did something, my experience with a stolen Apple Watch has been that police will not act if the location is a multi-floor multi-unit dwelling (e.g. a house converted into a duplex), since they don't know which unit to issue a search warrant for and won't issue one for the entire building. The underlying issue here is that AirTags do not provide any sort of altitude information. The X/Y r…

Sounds like the victim got lucky that the thieves were in a relatively small town. I can't imagine SFPD taking you seriously if you said "someone stole my thing and here is the pin on my map where they are."

Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief

#73

Post by jajko »

feedforward wrote: post #23
bko wrote: post #4

I've come to believe that acceptance of crime is a choice by officials. Many low level crimes I've witnessed are trivial to catch. For instance, find out where porch thieves like to hit. Plant a package there and park a patrol car there for a few hours and chances are you'll catch someone. Or put in a tracker. A cop can get a bike stolen in hours in the right neighborhoods in NYC. If a youtuber can park their car wit…

> I've come to believe that acceptance of crime is a choice by officials. Many low level crimes I've witnessed are trivial to catch. > And it's only a handful of people engaged in this low level crime. Arrest a few. And if they have a dozen prior arrests, like many of them do, keep them in jail for a while. The USA easily has the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world, and yet Americans like this say…

Behavior of small populations dont translate well into bigger one. Heck, even just to different society.

Swiss have direct vote on literally anything they gather 100k signatures for, ie joining Nato, EU, banning mosques, you name it. Yet the country runs like literal swiss watch. Give same freedom to British population and immediately you have brexit.

Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief

#74

Post by VancouverMan »

bArray wrote: post #22
bko wrote: post #4

I've come to believe that acceptance of crime is a choice by officials. Many low level crimes I've witnessed are trivial to catch. For instance, find out where porch thieves like to hit. Plant a package there and park a patrol car there for a few hours and chances are you'll catch someone. Or put in a tracker. A cop can get a bike stolen in hours in the right neighborhoods in NYC. If a youtuber can park their car wit…

I think it's because policing in general is not at the standard it once was. Currently police are only rewarded for "big busts", but it's the smaller crimes that make all the difference to the individual. In the UK for example, only something like 4% of burglaries get investigated at all. We're talking about the police not turning up at all. A neighbour down the street had a car stolen from their drive, under no less…

[flagged]

Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief

#75

Post by DaSHacka »

MisterTea wrote: post #7
everybodyknows wrote: post #2

> stolen out of her mailbox at the Los Alamos Post Office All the P.O. mailboxes I've ever seen have locks. What's going on? Was the thief actually a USPS employee?

Aren't there two locks? One, a master keyed lock for post office employees to fill the boxes and the other is individually keyed for customer access. Perhaps the crooks obtained a master key by either bribing an employee, cloned one, or stole one. Back in high school a friend was obsessed with the MTA subway and had a neighbor who was an MTA employee. He somehow convinced them to hand over their keys which had both t…

> All it took was one irresponsible employee handing their keys to a 16 YO.

Sometimes not even. As a semi-related personal story, many years ago in university some friends and I set out to reverse-engineer the master keys.

All it took was buying 10x of the same blank from an online retailer for ~$12, cutting 6/7 positions to the same dephs of our dorm keys, then iterating the last remaining position down one depth at a time (starting from a 0-cut) in the last remaining position.

Rinse and repeat until we had iterated all 7 positions across our 7 sacrificial blanks, and with a little napkin math, we were left with the bitting for the TMK. Cut the TMK bitting onto a new blank, and we now had the literal keys to the kingdom.

Many harmless fun times were had, steam tunnels, roofs, and penthouses explored, but had we been actually malicious the potential for damage or theft would have been huge.

I think those with the skills and smarts to perform sophisticated attacks typically set their sights higher in life than petty burglary, with most actual burglars resorting to more simple means like brute-force and violence.

I'd be very surprised if these burglars picked locks on the mailboxes or duplicated postal keys instead of having found some dumb bypass born due to a simple oversight in the mailbox's design.

Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief

#76

Post by abeppu »

IamLoading wrote: post #13
bko wrote: post #4

I've come to believe that acceptance of crime is a choice by officials. Many low level crimes I've witnessed are trivial to catch. For instance, find out where porch thieves like to hit. Plant a package there and park a patrol car there for a few hours and chances are you'll catch someone. Or put in a tracker. A cop can get a bike stolen in hours in the right neighborhoods in NYC. If a youtuber can park their car wit…

It is insane the amount of money police officers and their pension funds get paid. Yet??

Some public schools have played around with the idea of "performance-based" compensation, where teachers get paid more if they deliver better outcomes (unfortunately generally measured by standardized test scores) than would be expected on average, given the students coming in. This is mean to be about a 'value add', so teachers in schools with high socio-economic status students who were already going to score well don't get automatically paid more -- it's about an estimated 'improvement'.

I'm broadly aware that some health policy people want providers to be paid for caring for patients, not on a per-procedure basis. Get paid more for keeping your patients healthy and living longer, not for racking up more visits.

Does such a thing exist for policing? I think critically we need a mechanism for collecting crime stats that isn't fully dependent on the police themselves -- but at a high level, paying police to reduce actual crime, and shrinking their budget when crime actually increases, seems like a path to at least get what we pay for.

Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief

#77

Post by dmoy »

yogurtboy wrote: post #58
lazyasciiart wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seattle thought about doing that but reactionaries framed it as defunding the police department so they elected a more conservative council who moved it back.

Do you have any sources to this? I've long thought traffic cops should be their own separate entity, and would like to know how this played out

I wasn't even aware Seattle pulled people over for speeding much at all. WSP on the highways yes, but on the city streets there is not really any traffic enforcement by cops (outside of parking).

Seattle went from like 40k/yr moving violation tickets to 3k/yr over the last decade-ish.

I think GP might have been talking about the proposal to split parking enforcement out of the police department: https://mynorthwest.com/3093949/seattle-council-votes-move-p...

Which yes, was undone: https://www.theurbanist.org/2022/11/23/council-returns-parki...

But also only tangentially related to speeding enforcement.

Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief

#78

Post by brendoelfrendo »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #45
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pulling over a citizen with a job and citing them for speeding is a much more lucrative use of their time The solution may be in segregating the police from the traffic cops. Policework is dangerous and specialised. Its officers need a lot of training and good pay. Traffic cops are basically humans trained to be cameras, inasmuchas 90% of what they do can be automated.

The US is strangely staunchly opposed to traffic cameras, whereas you barely ever see cops on the roads in many EU countries, and yet traffic tickets flow abundantly.

If you eliminate the need for traffic cops, you need to accept that the "important" police work of criminal investigation and civil protection requires specialized training and skills (and probably more pay). American police departments aren't that; they're jobs programs with badges and guns.

Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief

#79

Post by bityard »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #45
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pulling over a citizen with a job and citing them for speeding is a much more lucrative use of their time The solution may be in segregating the police from the traffic cops. Policework is dangerous and specialised. Its officers need a lot of training and good pay. Traffic cops are basically humans trained to be cameras, inasmuchas 90% of what they do can be automated.

The US is strangely staunchly opposed to traffic cameras, whereas you barely ever see cops on the roads in many EU countries, and yet traffic tickets flow abundantly.

It's not strange at all.

Driving is dangerous enough as it is. Adding the extra anxiety of getting lit up by a speed-limit camera for accidentally exceeding the speed limit does not make it safer.

Plus, we Americans are inventive. If there were no traffic cops, the wealthy and mischievous would simply modify their cars to hide their license plates when driving past speeding cameras on their normal route.

Re: Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief

#80

Post by skeeter2020 »

jonhohle wrote: post #61
bArray wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's because policing in general is not at the standard it once was. Currently police are only rewarded for "big busts", but it's the smaller crimes that make all the difference to the individual. In the UK for example, only something like 4% of burglaries get investigated at all. We're talking about the police not turning up at all. A neighbour down the street had a car stolen from their drive, under no less…

Wasn’t this the broken windows philosophy that may or may not have reduced crime in NYC in the mid 90s? It seems like cracking down on low level crime should reduce bigger crimes, but the research seems to become politicized based on who instituted the policy.

The cost of punishment has also skyrocketed. Keeping someone in jail "a few years to cool off" costs a fortune.
Post reply on HN