I think it's great that they have time to do that. I'm happy that somebody in this country has working public services.
I'm just honestly surprised. I've only lived in Amsterdam inside The Netherlands and wouldn't expect the police to respond to something like that.
> it’s not a “search a whole neighborhood” situation
In retrospect I may have misread this:
> They gave the police the exact
> coordinates of my car and it only
> took the surveilling car 5 minutes
> to get to the car
I thought they had somewhat correct coordinates, but took 5 minutes to drive around the area to locate the car, as opposed to 5 minutes from wherever they were located before.
In any case, it doesn't make much difference. I think if someone called the police here in Amsterdam with the exact location of a broken-in car they'd say tough titty and have the owner show up at the closest station and file a police report.
Well the call center said it was a break-in or an accident. I'm sure the Amsterdam police would come if it was an accident and someone could have been injured.
So all I need to do to get Amsterdam police to care about bicycle theft is to install some sort of ribbon that'll get torn off if the lock gets broken, which'll be indistinguishable from the frame getting broken in half ("an accident"). Hook that all up to a GSM modem and a call center and suddenly my local cops will care about crime.
Given that there's hundreds of thousands of bikes stolen a year and the chance of the theft being solved is very, very low, it's very much a "prepare for the worst and hope for the best" thing.
I'm just honestly surprised. I've only lived in Amsterdam inside The Netherlands and wouldn't expect the police to respond to something like that.
In retrospect I may have misread this: I thought they had somewhat correct coordinates, but took 5 minutes to drive around the area to locate the car, as opposed to 5 minutes from wherever they were located before.In any case, it doesn't make much difference. I think if someone called the police here in Amsterdam with the exact location of a broken-in car they'd say tough titty and have the owner show up at the closest station and file a police report.