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Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

texastribune.org

71–80 of 325 posts

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#71
post #49

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…

All lives are not equal. The value of the life of a thief whose only impact on the society is negative, cannot be compared to e.g. a doctor.

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to live in a world where thieves feared for their lives.

You want thieves to be armed?

It's much more safe for a law abiding citizen to assume that all thieves are armed, because they most likely are.

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#73

Earlier 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".

In American style representative democracy there certainly are places where voting is useless depending on your political affiliation.

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#74

Earlier 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.

this is so untrue, gullible and naive. so if I steal your home, your car, your food, your water, and everything material, and you end up starving and dead or stranded on the side of a ride in a desert where no ones coming to help you - are you are saying that is ok since that stuff can be replaced?

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

#75
post #9

Earlier 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…

> Private Domicile, BITCH

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEdaQcq4w88

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#76
So to fight abuse and overreach by your leaders, you can:

- 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

#77
post #4

Did it reduce catalytic converter theft?

To quote from https://www.txdmv.gov/sites/default/files/body-files/MVCPA_F...

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

#78

Earlier 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".

Are you sure that doesn't qualify on the basis that it is the curtilage of your home? Often this counts as "in your dwelling" because it's in your private space that immediately accompanies the dwelling.

Re: Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

#79

Earlier 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.

In this case Texas defines "criminal mischief" in three clauses, and separately defines circumstances under which it constitutes a felony. Felony mischief is largely but not exclusively defined by the amount of pecuniary loss.

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

#80

Earlier 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.

Ah, but that’s not the choice. The choice is whether there exist probability p, life L, and material possession m such that the possession is worth more than p times L.

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.

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