Earlier quoted context omitted.
My comment may sound cliché, but I genuinely believe this, no material possession is worth more than a human life. A catalytic converter can be replaced, a life cannot.
> A catalytic converter can be replaced, a life cannot. So don't go around stealing catalytic converters. Same deal with states with "stand your ground laws". It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home. And on the "replacing" part- on whose dime? What if someone's only means of transportation is affected, and they lose wages or outright lose their job? Are you going to pay for it? Of course…
Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras
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Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras
#72Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do 84 year olds on life support count as representation?
According to voting turnout: yes. That's the thing the 70+ year old voterbase learned from their peak working year. And yet there are still so many working class people who try to profess how "voting is useless, it doesn't change anything".
Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Texas I'm surprised it's not legal to shoot a catalytic converter thief if caught in the act. That's what they used to do for cattle rustlers.
My comment may sound cliché, but I genuinely believe this, no material possession is worth more than a human life. A catalytic converter can be replaced, a life cannot.
You absolutely can cause death to a human and take a human life through material theft.
Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t see a catalytic converter theft on a car parked on the street as burglary. Parked in a (private) garage? Yes, burglary. Parked on the street? No. So, daytime theft of a converter from a car parked outside wouldn’t qualify I don’t think.
If you sleep in the car it will qualify no matter where you're parked. This also appears to be true of an RV or any vehicle that clearly accommodates sleeping. For reference: "Burglary" under the Texas penal code is defined by entering a habitation or any portion of a building that is not open to the public, either with the intent to commit a crime, or when followed by the actual commission of, or the attempt to comm…
Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras
#76- give up your car/vehicle propery
- let an LLC take ownership
- reside in the privacy protections of LLC and corporation
I don't think any successful case has happened yet where flock et al have pierced the corporate veil to get address information, nor dug into insurance records to find who the LLC-license plates belong to.
Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras
#77Did it reduce catalytic converter theft?
Number of times an ALPR was deployed. 61,875
Number of LPR Deployments by taskforce investigators 42,878
Number of vehicles recovered from LPR detection 1,963
Number of Cleared Cases – Catalytic Converter Theft 1,658
Number of arrests from LPR detection 569
Number of identified/documented prolific catalytic converter theft offenders 266
Number of Catalytic Converter Theft bait operations 236
The problem is they don't define "deployments". There are ~13,500 ALPR cameras and they do thousands of plates per hour and neither of those numbers matches the deployment. My best guess is it is a targeted search and so a vehicle is recovered or a case is cleared 2-3 times out of every 100 times they search the database.
Regarding actual reduction, as another comment said, the amount of crime fluctuates with metal prices, pretty much lockstep. But at least they can lock the people away.
Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parked in your driveway
No, the driveway wouldn't count. Texas doesn't define burglary by property boundaries; you have to enter a "building" or a "habitation", and a habitation must be a "structure" or a "vehicle".
Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can legally murder people to prevent "mischief", as long as it's at night? Wow.
IANAL. Mischief is typically a serious crime; the legal and common uses of the word are different and confusing. But I don't think Texas is restricting this to the more serious felony mischief here.
The first two clauses are destroying property and damaging property in a way that causes pecuniary loss to anyone.
The third clause is making marks on property. This seems like it would always be included under "damaging property in a way that causes pecuniary loss", so I would guess it's there to make it completely explicit that graffiti counts as criminal mischief.
The quoted section of the penal code does not appear to apply any restrictions to the specific variety of criminal mischief that justifies deadly force (other than that it occurs at night).
For something like graffiti where the general sentiment is that deadly force shouldn't be considered justified, I could see an argument that the use of deadly force violates §9.42(3)(A), which requires the person using deadly force to reasonably believe that the land or property in question "cannot be protected or recovered by any other means". If we view both verbs as applying to criminal mischief, you could make the argument that when you catch someone spraying graffiti on a wall on your property, your property can be recovered, though not protected, by e.g. repainting the wall.
The counterargument might be that "recovered" is in there as the appropriate verb for cases of theft, and "protected" is in there for cases of mischief.
I don't think restricting §9.42 to felony mischief would be an improvement to the law; it's difficult to know whether criminal mischief is or isn't a felony until you've tried to recover from it and learned how much that will cost. If you catch someone keying your car, for example, that probably is a felony, but as far as social impact I would rate it similarly to graffiti.
Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Texas I'm surprised it's not legal to shoot a catalytic converter thief if caught in the act. That's what they used to do for cattle rustlers.
My comment may sound cliché, but I genuinely believe this, no material possession is worth more than a human life. A catalytic converter can be replaced, a life cannot.
The conclusion that there is no such triad seems clearly absurd since we allow people to build things for us the construction of which offers them a non-zero chance of death.
It is reasonable to say that a precise frontier is not describable because of Sorites but to say no triad exists implies that you only participate in an economy consisting exclusively of zero risk behaviour[0] That seems improbable.
Once we’ve dealt with that, perhaps we may be able to conclude that catalytic converters exist on one side of the frontier or on the other side or perhaps we might say that they lie along the Sorites boundary.
0: we are not unreasonable. We might even choose to consider imperfect information about the risk, the risk being at a Pareto optimum, the risk being at optimum against counterfactual, etc.