Kind of sad, that I was surprised they did that. It's definitely a local thing. I'd expect the police to shrug, and say it's too bad, just file a report to use for insurance.
I remember people saying "so what if you have tags, police won't do anything and you shouldn't be confronting thieves anyway".
Apple, on the other hand, is also explicit about tags not to be used as an anti-theft device. The word "theft" doesn't appear even once on https://www.apple.com/airtag. It would be interesting if they still released a puff piece as a response: "Oh look, a carpenter `found` his tools in the next state, in a warehouse along with other tools. We don't know how they ended up there, but isn't that great?"
I lived in Howard County for a year. With the combination of county income tax and affluent property taxes, every service was exceptionally well funded.
Having lived in Mountain View & Sunnyvale, CA as well for a decade my experience was Howard County itself had quicker and better services than those cities.
It doesn't surprise me at all that their police department is competent and helpful.
Exactly this. Since there's less crime in affluent areas, the police actually have time to investigate what get's ignored in other areas. By also solving these crimes, it tells the criminals to avoid those areas, it's kind of a feedback loop.
It's also this way in smaller towns. I live in a small north GA town and you can ask the cops to come by your house during the holidays to see if anyone has broke in. Cops here are much more useful than when I'm in SoCal where I could even get cops to show up within an hour when a hit and run caused me to crash into someones back yard and total my car.
I'll offer a counterpoint - I live in a nice building in a bit of a rougher part of a major city. I've learned that the police do show up thankfully, but it takes a very long time unless there's literally a life on the line. (Which, I know, is better than some other major cities.)
The couple of times I've interacted with them, it's been painfully obvious to me that they feel like they need to put on a performance for me, even if it's clear that it's an unsolvable crime. (In both cases, it was a property crime worth reporting, but also one with literally no evidence to follow up on.) I honestly wonder if some of the less well resourced people in my neighborhood even get a similar time of day from the police - my impression is that they probably don't.
Given that 99% of the crimes are committed by repeat offenders, a simple dusting for fingerprints (costs pennies) could likely identify the culprit. But they don't bother. And they act like we've seen too many movies/tv shows. But when an "interesting" crime happens they do in fact dust for fingerprints (cheap!) and do all sorts of swabbing and testing (expensive). The police are lazy in CA especially. And yet they are also extremely well paid in CA. Someday, hopefully, this will change.
If a cop is making $30/hr, and we allow "pennies" to be as much as $0.25, they would have to complete the entire dusting for fingerprints process in 30 seconds.
Remember the DA is part of the equation. For low priority crime, there’s a lot of risk with using fingerprints. They won’t take a case they may not win.
Or different departments pushing responsibility to each other...
I had a break in. Thieves took my check books, and tried to cash one in at a payday loan place at a neighbouring city. The payday place called me, and of course, I told them not to.
I called my police department with additional information, and they told me to file a report in the neighbouring city instead... And of course, the other police department told me to file with my police department as the original crime did not take place in their city...
And oh, I also had airtags that were taken so I knew which building the thieves took my stuff to. But because it is a multi-tenant building, the police wouldn't do anything. I offered to trigger the sound to narrow it down, but they didn't allow that either... Eventually, the thieves found the airtags and threw them out.
Anyway, I contacted my representatives to give police more help to help in cases like mine, but crickets is what I heard back. Not even an acknowledgement.
Yeah, search warrants require probable cause to search a specific place. Air tags and the like are simply not accurate enough to pinpoint a specific unit in dense areas. I think the real answer here is to change how search warrants work: Allow a judge to approve a warrant for wherever the tag is--the police show up with equipment that can localize the tag. They do so in the least invasive manner they can, but the warrant gives them the power to go wherever the tag leads them.
There is a very simple hack to that: tell the police that you think you saw the perpetrator and are going to beat the hell out of them.
The same thing works with stolen goods tracked via AirTags: the police will almost laugh in your face when you request their help with retrieving the gear, but if you call the police (not 911) and tell them you are about to confront the thief in a physical altercation, they’ll be there within five minutes.
Is there a map of police response times somewhere? Sounds like this would make a good proxy for a map of affluent areas and would be useful for getting directions and stuff that avoid bad areas when you’re in unfamiliar places.
Just think of it: I say a car getting a parking ticket, while thieves were removing its catalytic converter. The dystopian future of having to pay cash for police services is closer than you consider, or even think. The "Community liaison" who showed up simply said "That is not their job."
Useful for criminals too. Come to think of it, a serious large sized criminal org would probably have such a map internally. And since there are more orgs like that, there is probably such a map-as-a-service somewhere for those in the know.
Are we still talking about the police in the OP? Who needed someone to give them GPS coordinates to find the stolen goods after at least 14,999 previous tool thefts went unsolved?
Not exactly batman level detective work here, this case was cracked because it was handed to them on a silver platter.
Oh I have which I why I'm surprised that everyone is reading this as the police doing a good job. This is a story of the police failing to do their job 14,999 times and only getting it right on try 15,000 because one of the victims solved the case for them.
It helps if there are less affluent areas nearby where police are more overworked, as it easily shifts the problem to those areas instead. For example, King county in the Seattle area is notorious for not locking criminals up, but as long as Bellevue police send a bunch of cops to each incident, no longer how small, detain people and even send them to jail (even if they are quickly released), it’s enough of a disincentive to send the problem back to Seattle or to southern suburbs where police don’t have time for that.
My buddy got his bike stolen in Mountain View. Not only did the police find his bike they also arrested the thief.
Another buddy was woken up one night by a drunken stranger pounding on his door. He called the MVPD and within 5 minutes 3 squad cars showed up.
I used to live in Dallas. One night an entire floor of cars parked in my apartment garage was broken into. I called the police and reported it. Then I asked when they're coming and if I should stick around to wait for them. They told me they're not coming. The next night, the thieves returned and broke into all the cars on the next garage level.
Funding really matters. Mountain View is one of the handful of cities in the country with a triple-A municipal bond rating.
We're down hundreds of officers though. And we don't and haven't had a mayor interested in bringing up a new system to replace the completely corrupt one we have.
(The latter part reinforcing your argument that we didn't try "depolicing" so much as, uh, "unpolicing"?)
The very next sentence highlights that the same problem existed before the Pandemic and police protests from 2020;
> Covid may have accelerated this trend, but attrition and hiring issues predate the pandemic. In the 2019 budget, Council approved over $700,000 for hiring incentives, citing the police department's difficulty filling positions.
Actually the very first sentence in the article immediately refutes your claim -- what a bizarre source to 'back up' the argument that Seattle defunded the police;
> "Why has Seattle lost so many police officers?" The answer is not that the Seattle Police Department was defunded.
Yes, I misremembered it and I was wrong about it which I discovered by googling it. But the number of police is way down, so it had the same effect as defunding. Part of the reason for the reduction is the Seattle City Council abused them by calling them murderers. The cops felt unsupported by the Council and unwanted, and they left.
I'm sure your anecdotal experience is true for you, but funding is not linked to clearance rates. Counter to copaganda, police are worse at solving cases compared to 30 years ago, even as crime rates have fallen dramatically and funding has increased.
If you think preventing and solving crimes, then American police are objectively bad at their jobs. If you think of police as revenue generators, then they're good at it. Because the police spend all their time on things like traffic citations. Even the police unions occasionally say the quite part out loud, like when the NYPD union famously said that they would not arrest anyone "unless absolutely necessary". Unsurprisingly to people that have looked into policing, crime doesn't increase during police work slowdowns.
I mean, if you weren't smugly comfortable in your biases, you could always just do a search, say for "FBI crime rate by year", or "police clearance rates by year", or "police funding per year", but I guess not.
(if only real cops could get that kind of response time/clearance rate!)
like that’s just a shitty argument yourself, you lost the argument on the facts so you’re complaining about how the presentation. Lazy argumentation, it’s a way to attack the messenger(‘s presentation) instead of addressing the argument.
It’s the highbrow version of “minor spelling mistake!!!!”.
we are talking about someone getting mad because they didn't like the word "copaganda" getting used in a discussion lol, how is this anything other than a total distraction from the point?
sealioning is right, bringing it up in the first place was a distraction, by design. if you don't want to discuss copaganda, get mad about the fact someone used the word copaganda rather than contradicting its existence or usage.
that's why tone arguments are a logical fallacy - they're an ad-hominem, you're attacking the speaker rather than the argument. it's far too easy to let this all slide into "well I would have agreed with you but now you've gone and offended me with your tone!!!" as a way to slam the door on a discussion you're losing.
as difficult as it is, the mature thing is to simply accept that this is a way that people legitimately feel about cops and their marketing/relations with the public, and that they feel there's very good evidence and backing for it. It's unfortunate that you feel offended, but you can't derail the discussion because of that.
(moreover, the idea that we have to inherently respect the cops as social guardians and blah blah is very much a neoliberal perspective to begin with. minority communities tend not to have such rose-colored perspectives on the issue etc. People who have their property stolen at gunpoint at the roadside by cops tend to have a different perspective too. This is not some universal norm that is violated here.)
I didn’t say it to be distracting. Indeed, I said it because the use of the word is distracting.
I am ambivalent on the topics in question. I could be persuaded either way by facts. But once someone reveals strong emotion motivates their argument, I am distrustful of their “facts.”
Sure, that might be quintessentially ad hominem, but we aren’t talking about mathematical proofs here. There is no indisputable proof. It’s just hearts and minds.
I’m not offended nor immature. I’m not tone policing. Speak and believe whatever you want. I was just commenting that I find that tone unpersuasive.
Just like I find the hypocrisy of calling me immature in the same comment that you lambast me for an ad hominem attack unpersuasive.
Bro. Don't literally admit to engaging in ad hominem attacks, and then get all pissy and try to gaslight and then condemn calling out your behavior as an illegitimate ad hominem attack.
Gaslighting. “You keep using that word. I’m not sure it means what you think it means.” - Enigo Montoya
I admit to an ad hominem argument. Then I point out that my critic is themselves using one. That’s not gaslighting. Gaslighting would be if I denied it.
And yes, I say that is hypocritical and unpersuasive. But it is unpersuasive because it is hypocritical not because it is ad hominem.
I doubt this is persuasive to you. It sounds like you are emotionally invested in this. But hopefully you can at least see my intention was not to deceive or manipulate.
It's the cops who said that. I assume that's why the phrase is in quotes. Apparently they themselves believed they performed some arrests that weren't "absolutely necessary". They said this as a threat to influence negotiations. You should take this question up with them.
Why be combative? I was curious about a statement and wanted to learn.
But seriously, why he combative? People used to be able to ask questions without being told to take it up with the NYPD. The entire world wants to fight and frankly, it’s embarrassing.
The Atherton police reports are hilarious. I can't find the site readily, but I remember reading some of them when I worked in Mountain View. Things like calling the police because landscapers are mowing the lawn loudly, or because there's someone dressed as Santa Claus walking down a sidewalk.
Kensington Police (near Berkeley) knew me, my car, and my two motorcycles just on a semi friendly basis. I didn't live there. I was just dating a girl who lived there her whole life.
Small town life exists even in major metro areas if you're wealthy.
Howard county has roughly half the population of San Mateo county and roughly half the budget. Attributing the difference solely to government funding seems challenging.
My guess is the carpenter knows someone that knows someone in the police department that they actually did something, but in a normal situation, definitely they won’t bother.
Yeah, I pointed the police to someone who was selling fifty plus obviously stolen MacBooks and iPhones, including mine (all described as "locked", "no charger, no accessories", etc., etc.) and the could not possibly care less.
The roots of police departments are the paid security forces of business owners, and their values as organizations reflect this. Business owners worked with local governments to create police departments to socialize some of the cost of securing their private property; their rented homes, their warehouses, their stores. And they reflect this to this day.
Individual property crime doesn't mean shit. A criminal can sell your Macbook if they like, but if they steal from Apple itself? Oh man there will be hell to pay.
A common good like security should be socialized because the alternative is multiple independent groups enforcing property rights, and when they start to conflict, you get a civil war won by the person who spent the most on security.
The idea that police are inherently corrupt because they developed from paid security forces ignores that the very process of development is what enshrined the rule of law over power.
I don't disagree that security should be a socialized good, it's a good idea. That doesn't change the fact that police in the United States and elsewhere were formed in the basis of law not to protect people but to protect property.
Even today courts have ruled that police are under no obligation to protect civilians from direct, inevitable harm. They are not there to protect you, they are there to protect "the peace" which can be fucking anything.
They are to protect order. So you, as a victim of a crime, are only a concern to them to the degree you make your harm public enough to disrupt order. Then they might attempt to solve a crime or make an impression they are doing something to prevent similar ones, but dissuading you from complaining too publicly about it (both by taking your report and showing it was useless) works just as well.
Let's also not forget that cops also pointedly refuse to their do their job when their feelings are hurt when people complain that they don't clean up the corruption and abuse in their ranks.
See: Chelsea Boudin and the SFPD. See DeBlasio and the NYPD.
> Even today courts have ruled that police are under no obligation to protect civilians
Yeah, LAPD's "protect and serve" was dreamed up by the City's marketing arm in the 1950s.
And those rulings have come because PDs have stood up and said "We have no obligation to prevent crime or protect people" and the courts have said, "Yup, you're right."
> A criminal can sell your Macbook if they like, but if they steal from Apple itself? Oh man there will be hell to pay.
Where do you get the idea that there will be "hell to pay" if you steal from Apple itself? People regularly run out of Apple stores with tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise and never get caught.
There is an amount of theft that apple is OK with because preventing it would hurt sales and occasional theift of product they can easily brick is certainly under that limit, plus there is likelyreporting biases, as it's likely you've seen videos of it happening but when there are arrests or recoverys you havn't seen those reports.
This is a regressive and defeatist attitude. We actually don't have to tolerate this in a society- those engaging in it should be punished and forcibly removed if they aren't able to change.
You misunderstand, the optimal amount of "loss" both internal and external, from Apple's perspective, is greater then zero. They know they could do straight forward things to reduce it, like put everything in the back room so you have to ask for it, or hire security guards to physically prevent theft.
But they decided that would be worse for business to prevent all theft then to simply have a few people steal stuff.
It being easy for people to grab thousands of dollars worth of stuff and run out of the store is a choice they made intentionally.
The optimum is never zero. Not because we like murder and rape as a society, but because we don't know how to make it zero and broad attempts to bring it closer to zero significantly limit our freedoms and worsen our society. Of course it sounds horrible if you're the victim of a rape (and I guess it would be terrible as a murder victim if you weren't, well, dead) that we accept a baseline level of crime as optimal but the fact is that the best way to get rid of rape is to prevent people from having sex. This is an extremely unpopular proposition and it is actually unlikely to be effective anyways, because wanting to have sex is far more desirable than wanting to rape people, and making crimes illegal doesn't actually prevent them from happening.
There are a number of less extreme suggestions that you actually probably hold (more policing, stronger sentencing, etc.) that people actually do support and are not obviously dead in the water but they have the same tradeoffs on a smaller scale. Do we accept, as a society, less crime that also makes it more likely that you will be mistakenly identified as a criminal? Should we funnel more money towards crime prevention instead of, say, healthcare? Going "we cannot tolerate any crime" sounds great but the optimal amount of crime will always be nonzero.
You are torturing the word optimal so I think it is meaningless to discuss that feature.
I also reject your view that everything is social tradeoffs. I think it is a extremely narrow perspective that completely ignores culture, norms, and behavior.
That’s literally what it means in this context. Apple puts up with some amount of crime because doing so is optimal for them. Driving crime to zero would cost them more money than it would save.
It is the best option of those available to apple.
That doesnt mean it is the best solution theoretically possible.
If I threatened you with the choice between death and paying me money you would probably choose the money. However, surely you think it would be better not to be threatened at all.
I think it is extremely closeminded to think that there is nothing that nothing else could be changed outside of apples control.
It is absurd to think that this is the optimal configuration of society and culture.
I think there are lots of preferable situations. The simplest and best is probably if theft was simply viewed as a personal moral failing and looked down on. This is reinforced by shaming and is how it works in high trust societies.
Other options include making sure people have enough success that they have something material to lose from getting caught stealing.
Despite agreeing with you in broad strokes I still don't see this being completely feasible. We should obviously strive for a society where people don't need to steal and don't feel compelled to steal either. That said, even in a much better situation there will still be someone who does it. At some point you really do have to go "investing more resources into this is not productive for society".
The optimum is the most desirable situation or outcome. It depends on the factors you can change, and those you assume are constant.
Surely you agree it would be best if Apple could have no theft, and no extra costs?
There are factors within apples control and factors outside apples control. Apple has limits to what it can do, but that doesnt mean that no better solutions exist outside the control of apple.
There is a best solution of those you can choose (relative), and also a best solution out of all those that are possible (absolute)
It is hardly unrealistic. You see cities, states, and countries where this type of thing simply doesnt happen, and others where it is a repeat problem.
It isnt like blatant and normalized property theft is an unchangeable universal constant.
Even in my local area, I can huge differences between areas a dozen miles apart, and have seen huge changes over time.
This is why I think it is silly to think nothing could be done differently, and whatever is being done is the best possible solution in every way.
This is basically saying every choice is perfect, and there is no room for improvement. This is defeatist and frankly wrong.
The optimum risk level is never zero. There comes a point where the cost of averting the risk is greater than the cost of the risk.
Consider my standard example of this: electric power. We insist nuclear plants be insanely safe, making them uneconomic, making us use far more dangerous sources of power instead.
I'm not saying the situation is inherently static. Rather, it's the most extreme case I'm aware of where the effort to reduce risk actually increases it.
Where did you get this idea about the origins of police? It doesn’t agree with the history on Wikipedia, or my understanding of their origin (having more to do with rulers maintaining order). Corporations, and what you call ‘businesses’ are a very modern concept, long predated by rulers, courts, and police.
>The first example of a statutory police force in the world was probably the High Constables of Edinburgh, formed in 1611 to police the streets of Edinburgh, then part of the Kingdom of Scotland. The constables, of whom half were merchants and half were craftsmen, were charged with enforcing 16 regulations relating to curfews, weapons, and theft.
That sounds a lot like businesses working with government to secure their property.
Conversely, one of the first recognisably modern police force was Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police, which was explicitly not paramilitary and had (still does) a mandate to police by consent according to what are now called the Peelian Principles which quickly spread all round the country.
This replaced, rather then grew out of, a mishmash of informal local watchmen and constables.
Those 'statutory police' were predated by others by thousands of years, and it seems more like the king enlisted business owners to enforce the king's laws in the city than 'paid security forces of business owners'.
Fast forward to today and it’s very common for private security to be composed of ex-cops and former military, creating a very fluid dynamic of all policing as a paramilitary organization in support of capitalism.
What do you think Slave Patrols were...? Security to enforce private property. Slaves were property. Runaway slaves might be property that stole itself, effectively, but it's the same thing.
And also, the slave patrol link has much stronger ties in the southern states where slavery was more prominent. That's not to say it didn't happen in the north, of course it did, but it happened more in the south, the south's economy was near dependent upon both the slave trade and the massive amounts of free-at-point-of-use human labor that supplemented their agricultural industries. That's why the civil war happened and don't start with me about how it wasn't about slavery, the confederate constitution lays out in black and white (beige?) that it was absolutely, definitely about slavery. The south's economy would've utterly collapsed with total abolition.
Slavery was not free. The slaver still had to guard, feed, house, and provide medical care. Contrary to common belief, the only industry where it was profitable to use slaves was cotton. (One reason the South failed to industrialize.) One of the problems the South had was even that was becoming steadily less profitable.
The US became the dominant economic power of the world because of free (as in freedom) labor.
If you are asking a best cop, what can they do? Legos shoplifted from Target were being openly sold at a thrift stall in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, everyone knew they were stolen, but until there was someone to formally connect the dots (they noticed legos from their store stolen at the thrift shop), the cops really couldn’t do anything about it.
It's possible for a beat cop to hand off a complicated case to detectives in their police department. I realize this kind of collaboration requires the police to give a shit, but it is possible.
In cities with less busy police departments, police actually do investigative work. I had police came by couple times asking for security footage for investigation nearby. One time it’s for a family member of a neighbor down the street “stole” a family car parked across the street. Another time was for an alarm wire tripped at 3am at a vacant house couple houses down the street. The footage showed a guy riding a bike slowly casing the houses along the street and 15 minutes later 3 cops spread out walking down the street sweeping the street with flashlights. I was quite impressed with the response time.
In alot of places, police tend to take care of friends and referred people first. The top down control involved in that discourages the rank and file from doing more than required.
When I owned a liquor store many moons ago, the police in that city basically would only respond, at least in any reasonable time frame, to businesses who made regular donations to the "Policeman's Benevolent Society". They didn't even pretend to hide their racketeering; it was openly understood you paid up or you got ignored.
I paid them $100/month, and as there was plenty of crime around, most of the other retail businesses no doubt paid up as well. I'm sure they made good money. I eventually had enough of not seeing much difference between the police and the gangs in town and sold the place.
A lot of cops are from working class backgrounds, stealing a man's tools is an old school, working class, "faux pas" for lack of a better term.
Steal a guys watch or TV, fine. He will go without. Steal his tools and his kids don't get Christmas. Even the most gruesome mob hitmen would turn their noses up at stealing a working man's tools.
I suspect there has to be more evidence than just the AirTag, but it is possible that the police used that tip to kick off an investigation that ultimately led to the warrant and search. Or they already started building a case. Based off the estimated 15,000 stolen tools, this theft ring was in the millions of dollars and was quite possibly already on their radar.
Warrant doesn't mean they had to go all storm trooper in that situation either, that would lower the risks.
I suspect just one more data point would be pretty easy to manage, peek in a window, or even have the dude drive around the facility and see if the location was consistently reporting.
Need to stick a camera on something like the Optimus 3 tracker with gps/cellular then although it’s already pretty large. Then you have proof where it is and pictures of the inside of the place.
Storage unit. You can drive right up to the door and use the precision tracking to confirm it's in there. And it's single story so you're not going to have a problem with it being upstairs. They might also have had permission from the owner to hunt for the tag.
The single case of theft I personally know about ever being acted on by the police, was when a business owner spotted the van that’d been present at burglaries of his business and several others (several of them had footage of the van, the thieves, and legible shots of the license plate—cops didn’t care), called the police to report it, and, when they still acted reluctant to do anything, said “you better come down here or I’ll confront them myself”.
I assume what got them to show up was that they didn’t want the bad press if the dude got shot.
Not bad strategy. Though I can see, depending on their disposition them turning against you. "Oh, you have gun? Better not reach for it! Is it registered, where is it?". They could turn into assholes real fast if they feel like you're trying to force them to do something.
There are cities that have gotten proactive and fought against high car theft rates by handing out free Bluetooth trackers to the public and having people hide them in their car.
Absolutely. Track down a purse + contents worth what, 200 USD, versus track down someone(s) who routinely steals professional-grade tooling, where probably each tool is worth 200 USD each, and it seems a lot of them were stolen.
The scale seems very different to reach any such conclusion as grand-parent.
small beans matter if you're a corporation. I've noticed my local news outlet loves to showcase footage of shoplifters from big-box stores (the kind that use government welfare to build their stores, don't pay any taxes, don't pay employees a livable wage, hire "part time" 39 1/2 hour employees so they don't have to pay insurance) asking the public to help crack the case for a $200 power tool, but if any average burglary victim tried to get news coverage about $2k of stolen goods they wouldn't stand a chance.
I shamelessly contribute to the local sheriff's association in the hopes i'll get better treatment if i ever need them, not the best deal ever but i've seen it work elsewhere so :shrug:
Apple, on the other hand, is also explicit about tags not to be used as an anti-theft device. The word "theft" doesn't appear even once on…
As well they should. The last thing Apple wants is some parent tracking down their kid’s stolen bicycle using an AirTag and wind up getting killed by the thief. They want people using these things the way my dad uses them: to find his car keys (or whatever else he might lose)!
> Apple, on the other hand, is also explicit about tags not to be used as an anti-theft device.
Because if people would rely on that then I'm pretty certain some would go and sue Apple if they fail to retrieve their property - e.g. because a thief noticed the "you're being tracked" notification on their iPhone or Android.
OTOH I'd really really REALLY love it if all the modern cordless power tools and their batteries would come with smart tags integrated that work with Apple's, Google's and Samsung's Find My networks.
And I'd love it if I could somehow tell my iPhone, my Android and my wife's Android which tags belong to the respective other... right now when we're travelling for longer than 2h, she gets notifications from my AirPods and keychain tracker, and I get a notification on each of my devices for her stuff. Makes the anti-stalker thing pretty useless if you routinely have to ignore it.
The lawsuit wouldn’t be over the owner not getting their swag bag, it’d be over the injuries sustained by getting beaten over the head with a pipe wrench by the thief.
Apple can't acknowledge that Airtags are an anti-theft device, because if they do, they would also be implicitly acknowledging that they are a stalking device.
The only reason why they can sometimes work against theft is because thieves do not realize they are being tracked. That's because Apple's anti-stalking measures are sometimes insufficient.
The fact that police aren’t going after stalkers anymore also doesn’t help. But ya, it’s impossible to tell the difference between a stalker and someone just trying to recover their stuff.
The scale of the theft probably plays into it. I read about cops not helping to recover stolen bicycles. But multiple power tools could reach into felony territory, depending on their value. I’m happy this person didn’t get a “not our problem” response, but I’m not surprised that these items were deemed “important” enough to pursue. And what a haul on the bust! $3-5m (estimate) in multiple locations.
Hope is get to read about the thieves getting pinched soon. Who knows, that huge caper in a Canadian airport just finally yielded arrests, so my optimism has been somewhat restored in _some_ aspects of the justice system.
FWIW, the London police was weirdly keen on finding my bike that was stolen with an airtag on it. Sent patrol several time over several weeks to chase after the thief. Not even in hope to unravel some big bike-stealing operation (they found it repainted and resold at a shop and didn't pursue further), just... keen, to my own great surprise.
Would recommend airtagging: even if you aren't as lucky as I was, at least you'll have the reassurance of knowing you did what you could.
My son’s E-bike was stolen. I hid an air tag inside the frame and tracked it to a house. Police came and helped me recover it. There are few things as satisfying as catching a thief.
>> Kind of sad, that I was surprised they did that. It's definitely a local thing. I'd expect the police to shrug, and say it's too bad, just file a report to use for insurance.
Two years ago, WhistlinDiesel youtuber used trail camera's and his air tags to bust his neighbors stealing from him. It took a few calls, but he got it done. He was smart and used the cops as mediators and didn't just go over and start yelling at the dude to get his stuff back.
Kind of sad, that I was surprised they did that. It's definitely a local thing. I'd expect the police to shrug, and say it's too bad, just file a report to use for insurance.
I remember people saying "so what if you have tags, police won't do anything and you shouldn't be confronting thieves anyway".
Apple, on the other hand, is also explicit about tags not to be used as an anti-theft device. The word "theft" doesn't appear even once on https://www.apple.com/airtag. It would be interesting if they still released a puff piece as a response: "Oh look, a carpenter `found` his tools in the next state, in a warehouse along with other tools. We don't know how they ended up there, but isn't that great?"