Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Seattle Sues Carmakers Over Easy-to-Steal Cars" video.

How many individuals can pick a lock faster that cult the bolt or squirt liquid nitrogen all over it before busting it with a hammer? The point is that there's a minimum efficacy standard for some of these products, in the case of these cars, the security is significantly lower than the other manufacturers otherwise you wouldn't be seeing this kind of rapid uptick in those cars being stolen specifically.
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@nolongeramused8135 Sometimes, but more often, they're intended to be enough of a pain that the potential thief moves on to the next victim. The only 100% effective lock is one that's so gummed up with crap that it can't ever be cleaned and unlocked. Obviously, such a lock is useless, so we're stuck figuring out what level of security is appropriate to the application. The nuclear launch button is going to require a better lock than a typical briefcase does for that reason.
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@TheRealScooterGuy Even if it were an actual gun, it probably should beclassified as vandalism unless there was some reason to believe there was some other intent. Go out in the country and just about every sign you see is full of bullet holes and the ones that aren't are mostly too recent to have been shot up.I doubt anybody would consider that to be anything other than vandalism. I do get that when you're in town, that there's a bit of a difference, but I do think that it shouldn't automatically escalate above vandalism just because it is a gun.
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The city can't catch them until after the cars are stolen and even if they are caught, tried and convicted, the expense in doing so can be significant. These suits aren't happening just because these are popular to steal cars, but because they're so easy to break into that there's literal tictoc challenges covering it. The city can't even send out police to catch routine shoplifter that might be detained by security, having to deal with that many car thefts is a major problem for the city to have to fund.
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jd To that point, I work in a grocery store in a department that's near one of the entrances, and very few of the shoplifters are doing so out of poverty and even the ones that might look it on the surface are stealing things that are luxury goods with cheaper options that are probably not any worse in quality. And yes, I see the same folks doing it pretty much every day, but getting the police out to intervene is pretty much not going to happen for a misdemeanor shop lifting charge. And collectively, it adds up to a lot of money, especially when they hit the meat department for a dozen expensive cuts of steak. I'm not personally convinced that jail time is the answer, but clearly the alternative of doing nothing hasn't worked and probably was always doomed to fail.
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@Nabeelco Except that it clearly does work to some extent as we didn't have this degree of trouble with shoplifters when the cops would respond and the prosecutors would file charges. Even if they just divert some of them to programs to clean up their acts, that's still some action taken to make it less likely they'll do it again. The current situation is basically that they'll shop lift something as if they were shopping, they'll go through the items looking for the one that they want, and then load up a shopping cart before walking out the door with the full cart, knowing that there's nothing that the store can do about it legally. Shopkeepers privilege does generally allow for those people to be detained, but it's not a long term detention, it's typically limited to the time it would take to get the cops out after they've been detained. And if there's no cops that are going to come, then it's questionable at best as to whether the shopkeeprs can detain suspects at all.
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@christopherg2347 That was a large part of it, the other part of it was that jails were very easy to break out of and lynch mobs could also easily break in. The concept of life without possibility of parole wasn't a practical possibility at that point, so for serious crimes, there weren't viable options for execution for serious things like murder and horse theft.
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@I_SuperHiro_I All that does is make the 3rd strike something stupid violent. It doesn't do much to stop people from offending. If the previous two interventions weren't effective, I'm not sure why the 3rd attempt would be any different.
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@irdmoose Even without it being illegal, you're still risking being roped into somebody else's felony. I remember a decade ago when I was working security that it was a common thing for drug dealers to steal cars to do drug runs in, they'd then abandon it on the side of the road. The cars would be mostly fine afterwards, but if it was your car, then you lost use of it for the period it was stolen and the period where the police are collecting evidence. Plus, I'd imagine a fair number of people had to get a defense attorney involved in case the police didn't believe that the car had been stolen.
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@shawnmccarty6923 I think more likely, they'd change the law to make the person doing that accessory to whatever it is that the car thief does after stealing it.
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@ZboeC5 The problem is that the city attorney basically stopped filing certain kinds of charges for political reasons. We then got a bunch of city council members that took a similar line and the mayor as well. Voting does matter, but crime is only one facet of these campaigns. And we had at the time a top two primary where when there were a bunch of candidates there could be pressure to vote for the candidate that you thought could beat the candidate you hated. We do now have a ranked choice voting system in place for future elections, so hopefully voting will be more impactful as the voters will be able to give different levels of support for different candidates and completely withhold support from the worst candidates.
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