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.
That is a huge inventory. How do stolen tools get fenced? Sent abroad? Craigslist and FB marketplace? I've bought some used tools from online classifieds, but it always seems to be a homeowner or business owner selling one or two things.
Every flea market I have ever been to in my life always has some guy with a huge amount of lightly used and heavily assorted high-dollar power tools.
Before Home Depot started putting tools in cages, I used to see a lot of craigslist/marketplace/etc postings for brand new and unopened tools, posted at amazing prices.
Yeah, and then people act like the flea market is some precious cornerstone of the local culture. In my city there is a flea market that has dozens of freshly stolen bikes every week. There's a fund where people buy back the bikes and reunite them with their owners. Unfortunately, there's no fund supporting violence against these bike thieves.
Depends highly on the region. Most US prisons look like daycare compared to Japanese prisons, wrt prisoner treatment. (The prisons in the southeast US are an exception to this)
I don't really mean it in the quality of life sense as prison is pretty awful in most of the world, especially in developing countries.
The 13th amendment codifies slavery into our prison system and few things are as barbaric in my mind. It's basically a few small rungs down from sacrificing prisoners to Quetzalcoatl and the rain gods, which is graphic but no more dehumanizing. States with prolific death penalties just skip the religious angle.
The photo shows them walking in a line next to a guard that doesn't have to walk? I don't get it.
A lot of prisoners get treated badly, but the inherent idea of being forced to do labor doesn't strike me as ridiculous. Just about everybody has to work. Comparing it to sacrifice is stupid.
Yes, but it's not nearly as big of a gap as the above comment suggests.
Being in prison sucks. If there's forced labor that approaches the same magnitude of unpleasantness, or even worse exceeds it, then that's a huge problem. But if it makes prison mildly worse than zero labor, that's not a tremendous issue.
> I think the sacrifice comparison wasn't to labor, but to the fact that capital punishment is still practiced in the US.
I can't figure out any way to read the comment that way, unless they rewrote part of it and totally messed up the phrasing.
Whether or not the work sucks is orthogonal to the many reasons slavery is bad. While inmates certainly don't have freedom, they are still not property of the state, and profiting from their labor is both immoral and presents a huge moral hazard to the broader criminal justice system.
> I can't figure out any way to read the comment that way
? The comment literally says:
> States with prolific death penalties just skip the religious angle.
They're talking about the state putting people to death. Human sacrifice is when it was done to placate the gods. Modern day capital punishment is when the state puts people to death to placate the retributive demands of the people.
> States with prolific death penalties just skip the religious angle.
But read the two sentences before that. They're making a complete comparison without mentioning death penalties at all, and without any placeholders that could be filled in by a later sentence. The third sentence mentioning death penalties does not retroactively change what the first two sentences were talking about.
The comment very clearly says that slavery in the prison system is next to sacrifice, not just the death penalty.
If it wasn't supposed to say that, then the original commenter needs to come here and clarify.
> Whether or not the work sucks is orthogonal to the many reasons slavery is bad. While inmates certainly don't have freedom, they are still not property of the state, and profiting from their labor is both immoral and presents a huge moral hazard to the broader criminal justice system.
So there's a much bigger and connected moral hazard, that the people that are paid to run prisons want there to be more inmates, whether or not they do any labor. That's especially bad when it's third party for-profit companies running things. And they'll use prison labor to make extra money on top of what they're already paid.
We should fight against that situation very strongly.
But if we have all the money controlled by the state, and the labor merely reduces the cost of keeping prisoners, then there's not a huge moral hazard to the criminal justice system.
If prisoners actually start making enough money to offset the entire cost of the prison system, then we should intervene. But limiting hours and/or giving more of the money to the actual prisoners doing the labor should be enough to fix that moral hazard.
Read it in context again, it is commentary on the US prison system as a whole.
> But limiting hours and/or giving more of the money to the actual prisoners doing the labor should be enough to fix that moral hazard.
Maybe but it doesn't address the immorality of the situation to begin with. There's a simple solution, here: eliminate the prison loophole for slavery. There can still be labor in prisons, it should just follow prevailing labor law.
The critical sentence is "The 13th amendment codifies slavery into our prison system and few things are as barbaric in my mind."
I can see your argument that the thing being called barbaric is the prison system in general, but I'm still pretty sure the thing being called barbaric by that wording is specifically the slavery part.
> Maybe but it doesn't address the immorality of the situation to begin with. There's a simple solution, here: eliminate the prison loophole for slavery. There can still be labor in prisons, it should just follow prevailing labor law.
That might be best but I'm not sure if it's obviously the best option.
The labor could actually make prison mildly less worse, as it breaks up the monotony of doing nothing. There is also often some comp, although way below minimum wage, and you can opt out (most don’t).
> It's basically a few small rungs down from sacrificing prisoners to Quetzalcoatl and the rain gods, which is graphic but no more dehumanizing.
The sacrifice would then be laid on a stone slab, a chacmool, by four priests, and their abdomen would be sliced open by a fifth priest with a ceremonial knife made of flint. The most common form of human sacrifice was heart-extraction. . . . The cut was made in the abdomen and went through the diaphragm. The priest would rip out the heart and it would then be placed in a bowl held by a statue of the honored god, and the body would then be thrown down the temple's stairs. . . .
The body parts would then be disposed of, the viscera fed to the animals in the zoo, and the bleeding head was placed on display in the tzompantli or the skull rack. When the consumption of individuals was involved, the warrior who captured the enemy was given the meaty limbs while the most important flesh, the stomach and chest, were offerings to the gods.
Prison aka confinement is a form of violence. A lot of people consider "when the good guy hits the bad guy it's not violence" no no, it's still violence.
Restraining someone against their will is a violent act, it's just an acceptable form of violence (that of course I agree with) used by the "Good" to deal with the "bad" (relative terms ofc)
There has to be some kind of personality distribution thing here with how people view this kind of thing. My general take is "I'm attacked, _especially_ if I'm with family; just shoot them. There isn't even a quibble in my head.
Why do you immediately think of it as that violent ? ,
Not tolerating the crime, involves arresting the person, and penalizing them with fines and other consequences for a while, and then if possible work on improving their living standards and help them get a job to get out of a life of crime.
Not tolerating crime does not mean shooting people up or inflicting wounds on them, why should it be that extreme ? , either inflict wounds on people or let them go free with misdemeanor charges ?
It just kills the conversation and scope to actually fix this rise in crime mess, that is spreading everywhere.
> Why do you immediately think of it as that violent ? , Not tolerating the crime, involves arresting the person, and penalizing them with fines and other consequences
Different branch of these threads:
> So they steal from you, and then you get the privilege of your tax dollars paying for their room and board. I dunno, I can see why some people might not be chuffed to bits by that solution.
If we’re going to make sure we get appropriate vengeance, and we’re not going to pay to incarcerate them… what do we have left? Physical punishment? Slavery? Unless bankruptcy of a person (without any assets to begin with) alone is a sufficient punishment for these crimes, I’m all out of ideas on where this could go.
You may not be who he was referring to, but the people he was referring to certainly seem to be present.
Your two sibling comments are currently "Why is the comfort of the aggressor more important than the comfort of the innocent victim?" And "Yes." The assumption that some people in this thread are in favor of violence seems to be borne out.
Wishing physical violence into any IRL situation is some real keyboard warrior crap. I understand the appeal, I sadly do, but we need to move beyond it.
Will you be the one to deliver the violence, or would you rather someone else did that on your behalf?
Anyone who has implemented violence IRL is also scarred, for life.
I don't think they were suggesting that violence is the preferred option. But I don't think there's any country where law enforcement cares about bike theft, so prison isn't really an option.
> Ministry of Justice records show that in the five-year period between June 2017 and June 2022, just 159 people (out of roughly 350,000 bike theft cases) were found guilty of bike thefts and only two of these were given immediate custodial sentences.
The police could do way more, but it's easier to victim blame ("register your bike, use two locks, etc.")
So they steal from you, and then you get the privilege of your tax dollars paying for their room and board. I dunno, I can see why some people might not be chuffed to bits by that solution.
Describing prison as "free room and board" is absurd. People are not going there by choice. They are there because we as a society say they should be there, and we pay for that as a society. Every attempt to not do that (e.g. by charging people for the cost they impose on the judicial system) has turned out to be an exploitative nightmare. Are you also upset that people steal and therefore your tax dollars need to go towards policing?
I didn't say "free room and board" – you did. You also said that going to prison isn't a choice, but also that I can choose to go to prison whenever I want, so which is it?
Someone in a sister thread suggested sharia law and chopping off hands, so clearly there are other alternatives besides "society pays for prison" and "the criminal pays for prison".
And yes, I am upset that people steal and that this causes more of my tax dollars to go to heightened policing. Why wouldn't I be? Presumably the only people that are not upset about that are criminals and potentially the police.
> That is a huge inventory. How do stolen tools get fenced?
Sold in bulk to someone overseas is my theory, way too much effort and risk selling this stuff piecemeal online or locally. You can see something similar happening with stolen cars in the US. [1]
If I had a bunch of power tools stolen the first place I'm checking is Facebook Marketplace. I refuse to believe I would be the only person checking the usual sites for such goods.
From the article they note that some of the things they found were VERY old, sounds strange but maybe they hadn't gotten to that part / were not able to move that much stuff:
>Some were stolen as long ago as 2014
Weird situation near me, some local folks where stealing construction stuff were found not far from me and ... they found everything stolen over the course of a few years. If a generator and some tools were taken, there they were, all of them together. It appeared they straight up had no plan / active effort to sell everything.
A former coworker came to the USA from Chile with a degree in Molecular Biology but couldn't find work in that field because of his language barrier. Instead he got a shitty job and build a small export company that sold used appliances and other goods from the USA to Chile. A big chunk were things like air conditioners, refrigerators, and washing machines. Even though Chile is a 50Hz 220V country 60Hz stuff will run off a transformer though sub-optimally which for most people is better than nothing. BUT he also found a more lucrative path by selling gun parts (mostly ammo parts like shell casings) hidden within said appliances. So there is an international market for this kind of stuff.
When I was car shopping back 20 years ago, there was a 18-year-old car with low milage and a salvage title offered for sale that the seller claimed had been stolen and sat in a warehouse for over a decade. I think a lot of theft in general ends up being “poor business.”
I'm going to assume that whoever's doing the stealing is being paid; as opposed to merely amassing a warehouse of tools collecting dust.
So, how is the money coming in to pay the thieves? How is the money coming in to continue to pay for the storage units to store the tools? It doesn't make sense.
That seems like the mostly likely way, at least for the new items stolen from retail. Trying to sell on craiglist/FB marketplace doesn't seem like it would scale. An unscrupulous hardware store owner could mix the stolen goods in with their stock to pad their margins. The tools could also be used as stock for 3rd party seller on Amazon.
Amazon comingled inventory would be the perfect vehicle for the perfect crime. They can’t even tell who shipped what, it’s basically like a cryptocurrency tumbler but for real world goods!
The Amazon marketplace seller is what I thought would be the most used route. Selling overseas would require hardware changes with the plugs I would think which would probably not be something they're willing to do. Unless it's common to use adapters or have people make that mode themselves as part of the "but it was cheap"???
Amazon marketplace is one of the best fences of all time.
China exports lots of stuff to the USA and those containers go back empty. They can easily be filled up with stolen iPhones and catalytic converters for recycling, so that they aren’t all empty.
That’s way too much trouble, and Chinese customs is really serious about their 100% tariff for DIY car imports. Stolen iPhones and cats are much easier to smuggle in, and have little value outside of Chinese recyclers.
For whatever reasons, my mind equates overseas with Europe and even Eastern Europe more specifically when it comes to trading in illicit wares. In my mind, any where in the Americas just isn't overseas.
But you are absolutely right in that a lot of stolen items do end up in that part of the world.
I just read (by audiobook) two great fiction works by Colson Whitehead that include some of these ideas, Crook Manifesto then is prequel Harlem Shuffle.
It was selling stolen clothing. Odd that it wasn't stolen cameras.
I think I actually visited that store once or twice (before the bust) and it seemed like a nice little shop, though I didn't see how it could stay in business. I guess now I know.
Here in Texas you can just look on Facebook marketplace. Included is photos of garages and living rooms filled to the brim with new in the box name brand tools
I had my Apple Pro Display XDR stolen from the office in Lisbon, Portugal.
They also stole my AirPods Max which has Find My technology built in.
It happened over the weekend and when I found out about the burglary about 2 days later I checked the Find My app. I saw my AirPods Max was in a small town about 3 hours away from my office.
I informed the police and they said there’s nothing they could do about it due to privacy concerns. Ugh.
I considered going there myself, but it being in a foreign country, not knowing the language, having no transportation, and not knowing what or who I’d find when I arrive, I ultimately decided to not risk it and never ended up going.
A few days later the signal went offline. Months after that it showed up on the map again. It was in Moldova at a shopping mall known for selling electronic parts.
I don’t know what happened to my Apple Pro Display XDR, but if you ever see one for sale in Portugal please send me a message :D
BTW, interesting side story: They didn’t just steal my display and headphones, but also many computers from other offices. Multiple floors except one. I guess they didn’t have time for that one. A week later they came back to rob that other floor as well.
"A modified version of OpenHaystack to showcase the possibility of building a stealth AirTag clone that bypasses all of Apple's tracking protection features."
Impressive. Here is the blog post (also linked from their github) that talks about the bypass (the tldr; is that they rotate through public keys in a deterministic way, so Apple’s protections think it’s a new device each time and thus don’t warn about a persistent tracker).
Though none of the prolific thieves has been arrested yet, Der said, “we are investigating several suspects for their roles in this massive theft scheme and expect charges soon.”
Oh, I totally use them for the same thing. It's more that whenever this comes up, some people inevitably go off on tangents about how that's not what AirTags are used for, and we're crazy for using them for this (incredibly obvious) application.
“The first mass-produced cotton swab was developed in 1923 by Polish-American Jew Leo Gerstenzang after he watched his wife attach wads of cotton to toothpicks to clean their infant's ears.”
>mentions wanting to use airtags for finding stolen things
usually, this is in regard to complaints about the anti-stalking features making airtags less useful for finding stolen things. use airtags for whatever you want, but apple has made it clear that's not their priority when making product decisions.
GPS trackers with SIM slots and cell radios have been available for ages, and easily enough found for purchase that I don't think mentioning them here adds meaningful risk. AirTags distinguish on Apple's UI polish - including the care for stalking mitigation - and platform integration, rather than their basic functionality.
It required the victim to take matters into his own hands and invest inyo buying multiple AirTags in order to sort out the burglary. I wonder how many of these burglary cases just sat there gathering dust and for how long.
A good Hollywood caper story would end with this being ultimately engineered by the tool vendors themselves in order to stimulate more demand for their goods.
This is exactly what I was thinking, because a real theft ring wouldn't be sitting on so much unsold inventory... what if it ends up being the dealer reps attempting higher commissions?
----
As a retired tradesman (IBEW), discovering your tools have been stolen is "up there" in gut-wrenching professional experiences. My good luck meant most items stolen from me were probably just "walk aways" [leant out, never returned]. Last time my work truck was burglarized, they only stole personal effects (leaving behind thousands in rechargeables).
That would be a good Hollywood ending. Sadly the world has become so credulous that people probably believe nutty conspiracy theories like that today.
When two seconds of thought would make anyone realize that the conspiracy story is insane: professionals working at a company literally paying for criminal acts targeting their own customers, in support of a sales increase they could never get credit for, and which would bankrupt the company overnight if it ever came to light.
But critical thinking seems nearly extinct, and the thrill of having figured it all out seems irresistible.
Compared to some stuff that actually seems to happen, the only leap of imagination I see here is that it would bankrupt the company overnight, or that it would matter to the people involved.
Not to say that it's even remotely likely, but all you need is for someone with a vested interest to find a cost effective way to boost sales. Depending on how desperate people and the broader economy are, and how little people care about risk, it's not exactly that farfetched that people will go to insane measures. People will try and pull off ridiculous schemes/crines for relatively small amounts of cash or even social media points and shoulder huge amounts of risk, and then turn around and buy nonsense with it, that's just America.
The person stealing doesn't need to know who hired them, nobody else at the company needs to know did the hiring, shareholders are happy.
> The person stealing doesn't need to know who hired them
I think you're vastly underestimating how difficult it is to anonymously recruit and pay thousands of thieves from all over the country to target one particular brand and ensure they actually do the job.
Maybe one could offer some sort of buy-back program to maybe induce this behavior, but that would be quite expensive.
CVS is defending against hundreds, maybe thousands of small time crime rackets.
But imagine you’re Black and Decker, and you want to hire thousands of thieves around the country to target tens of thousands of your customers (People who bought DeWalt, Stanley, etc).
How? Is there a budget line item for market development? And you convert maybe $20m into cash, and have reps in major metro areas? Do you fire low performers who don’t steal enough?
The whole thing collapses when you think about the logistics. No different from the “1000 people were paid off to falsely claim they saw an airplane hit the Pentagon, but nobody has come forward with receipts” nonsense.
Normal business is impossible to get right. These kinds of conspiracies are just fantasy.
> Is there a budget line item for market development?
Sure.
> And you convert maybe $20m into cash, and have reps in major metro areas?
You’ve seen examples in the thread. Flea markets, online marketplaces, injections into clean retail supply chains. (Amazon)
> Do you fire low performers who don’t steal enough?
Yes.
The existence of small time crooks doesn’t prove that organized crime is a myth. Getting stolen at scale commodities to market is not so different than managing global supply chains of cocaine and heroin. The street level people are independent contractors who make near minimum wage. The best example of business that skirt the line between legit and criminal enterprise are Chinatown busses… they provide cheap, unsafe travel and fuel the human trafficking pipeline of sexually exploited women as well as economically exploited restaurant and other employees.
I didn't attribute a difficulty ranking to it or suggest any particular scale, or suggest I'd be the one to do it, but I have no doubt it would be difficult.
Would it not be in the same ballpark of reasoning though as updating your older products to intentionally slow them down and influence more sales, or updating your trains to conveniently not work when they're at a competitors depot?
Sure it'd be a more blatant demonstration of sociopathy and criminal intent to commit widespread theft of tools, but really we'd only need one missing detail, and that's a connection back to the companies, the theft is already happening.
In this case it doesn't seem it's nationwide or one particular manufacturer, but if you're in a position to even consider such a thing, I'd think you either don't care or don't anticipate being caught, and perhaps don't care about precision or results, which really reduces the problem. Like if you're a popular retailer of many brands, but seeing sales slump. Now you can just find someone who already coordinates thieves to steal any equipment in some region, and if all you care about is that warehouse is filling up and your sales are increasing, your first problem is solved.
> people probably believe nutty conspiracy theories like that today.
Executives were upset about the newsletter’s coverage, so their employees set out to ruin the lives of the couple who ran the website, sending a funeral wreath, bloody pig face Halloween mask and other alarming items to their home, authorities said. The employees also sent pornographic magazines with the husband’s name on it to their neighbor’s house and planned to break into the couple’s garage to install a GPS device on their car, officials said.
Did the carpenter alter the tags?! Afaik they beep sounds around other unpaired iphones, additionally, using apps like AirGuard can alarm you about such ones.
If they were in a storage unit, the thief may not have stuck around long enough to notice. And it sounds like this happened pretty soon after theft, so they wouldn’t have started to beep.
It takes 3 minutes to remove the speaker. There are great tutorials on youtube. I've only purchased airtags for use as theft recovery, and if they beep it defeats the purpose.
I also have one on a office key (useful, it vanishes every few months), umbrella (useful, its left in restaurants and vanishes in the car trunk), laptop bag (useless so far, I never forget about it), and car (waiting for it to be robbed but its old)
Did the thieves bring their phone with them to steal from numerous job sites as far back as 2014?
That would seem like a poor choice. If the same thieves are taking everything they might be "smart" enough to NOT bring a personal tracking device with them.
The carpenters at the top end, those that have receipts, and serial numbers, may see a few tools, but for the vast majority of day workers, they will see nothing, not even a notification that the police will auction everything off, and will have to buy everything again, for maybe the third or fifth time.
Either they ran into a wall investigating and needed public help, or to get victims back what was stolen? Or, it says they expect charges soon, so maybe they waited until the investigation was over.
The logistics of this is kind of interesting to me. Even if each of the victims reported them to the police, the value of the items from each theft wouldn't add up to much in the grand scheme of things. Construction equipment might raise more of an eyebrow, but the hand tools would even be noticed. Unless...someone was collecting all of those reports and analyzing them bigData style, o wait, we're talking about the police here.
Of course it was a civilian victim tired of the cops being unable to do anything. I say unable vs unwilling even though I'd also suggest unwilling, but I digress. It's the kind of theft ring that would just not motivate anyone to look at anything. I wouldn't be surprised to see that this has been going on for a really long time. It's kind of genius
> Even if each of the victims reported them to the police, the value of the items from each theft wouldn't add up to much in the grand scheme of things.
I don't think you know how expensive commercial power tools and accessories are..
They cited 15k items with a range of 3-5 million. At 3 million that's $200 an item. Hardly peanuts.
The article also says the tools likely came from a variety of sources
You say that like they knew it was there after investigating lots of very small value crimes which led to a very big take down.
Instead, a couple of cops followed up with a gift wrapped solved case of "locate my stolen items at this exact location", and stumbled into a big take down just because they decided today they'll do some real police work.
Had this one civilian not been pissed off enough to plant trackers, this caper would have continued for years.
I don't think you know anything about me to claim I don't know the value of tools commercial or not. I have quite the collection, come from a family of construction where my grandfather was a custom cabinet maker where I grew up in his woodshop. It's amazing how people just assume so wildly wrong.
Even at $200, that doesn't even qualify as anything more than a misdemeanor. The police are just not going to care if the victim even bother reporting it. I've had my battery powered lawn equipment stolen within the time it took me to push my mower to the front of the house and then walk back to the garage to grab the now stolen items. Of course I didn't report it to the police. Why would I waste my time as well as theirs? I even specifically qualified some equipment like construction equipment would potentially raise an eyebrow implying their value is more than my weekend warrior power tools.
Talking about totally being so far off base, and missing the point that you even attempt to use math to get to. However, even your math totally misses the point. If you think $200 gets the police excited, you are grossly putting too much faith in the system. It doesn't matter at all that somebody else thinks $200 is hardly peanuts. It doesn't move the needle at all in motivating someone doing some investigating. That is the point I was making. It's the perfect crime to run for a long time as even if it is reported, nobody is going to do anything about it.
Maybe you are familiar. But the point of calculating per item was to show its easy to take thousands of dollars out of the back of a truck in an instant. Most are targeted, as in this case as it was the second time, and not a crime of opportunity like you experienced.
They guy was a successful score in the past. More than likely, it was the same people coming back to see what else could be taken. Especially now seeing it was a large operation makes me even more confident that would be likely. Not really sure what your point is at all. Except you seem to think that $200 is enough to make a cops investigative socks go up and down which is the point of contention. Even an ant hill can get massive one grain of dirt at a time. Lots of ~$200 items adds up to a big number, but again, individually they are nothing to get police excited about at all. It's not even enough to claim on insurance. You're just really trying for some unknown reason to hold on to this fallacy of yours.
Because they were specifically shown the guy's items were there. They didn't find it for him. They took the data provided, asked for a warrant, and then proceeded from there. How is that confusing? It's not like they were expecting to find what they did. I'm actually surprised they even did that. There are lots of stories of people showing the police their Find It showing their device at a specific location and doing not a damn thing with that information.
The cops get to keep all the stolen goods and auction them off. Ofcourse they are happy for this huge haul. Most of these tools will never find their original owner.
I don't get it - how could you be this well organized about your criminal business and yet not have process to find and remove tags before leaving at your storage for all your other crimes. Sloppy.
criminals don't tend to be this well organized either, once you have a well organized criminal they start to develop processes etc. in the same way that other organized individuals do.
I'm thinking probably an underling getting paid a small amount delivered stuff and whoever was supposed to handle it messed up the same way people mess up deployments or other things.
What was the point? The thieves stole the tools, put them in storage lockers, and then...did nothing? Didn't fence them, sell them on E-Bay, what was the point? They had storage lockers all over the place filled with tools...what was the point of the thefts??
either it was NIMBYs preventing construction in their neighborhoods or the goods in the warehouse represent a small fraction of all they’ve ever stolen. given the scale being stored, I think they’re a fence, not the thieves themselves, which means they paid upfront for all those tools, which means they must be selling quite a bit to have that cash available for reinvestment.
There’s obviously a use case referencing something like this article. It would be nice to see some kind of officiating this particular use case of protecting your property, perhaps you could register your tag, pay a fee and deposit / signing a waiver to prevent the stalking use case. It would also be nice to see police go after missing items which have been officially tagged.
But I’m also not a huge fan of big brother in general. So maybe forget about it
But it's not the primary use... If the thieves had iPhones they woulda been altered that they were being tracked. It's a good use, but not one that should be relied on
In the video that shows the stolen tools in the warehouse, there are hardly any Ryobi tools (HomeDepot's cheap tool brand). This is in stark contrast to many of the recent woodworking videos on Youtube that feature craftspeople using Ryobi tools (without explicitly mentioning an HD sponsorship). The thieves know a good tool, and HD is trying to fool the rest of us that their Ryobi tools are any good.
FYI. Ryobi has nothing to do with Home Depot. It's owned by a Hong Kong power tool manufacturer, and used to be Japanese (in fact, Ryobi still exists as a tool manufacturer, just not the power tool division)
Probably the reason they're not in any of the hauls is because they have a reputation for not being very good, and are harder to sell/fence...
If you are a diyer that needs it for maybe 1-2 jobs a year, ryobi is usually not a bad choice.
Personally, I stick with DeWalt because I like quality even though I fall under the “diyer” category. This impact driver has survived 5-6 moves, at least a handful of projects across a few years, and it’s still working as if I just picked it up from the store. Haven’t had to do any maintenance or repairs.
One of the cheaper harbor freight or off brand power tools I picked up many years ago lasted at most 1-2 yrs with only a few projects. Which is the reason I started investing in higher quality (prefer dewalt, but will buy Milwaukee).
If you want gold-plated, there's Hilti, but you're paying a lot extra for a marginal increase in reliability. Milwaukee, Bosch, Makita, and DeWalt are all in the same range, ie contractor/prosumer (and all mostly are manufactured in China). Ryobi is slightly lower but generally fine, ie consumer / price sensitive. Below that is Harbor Freight / no-name electric drill you'd find in am Amazon Basics "essential tools" kit.
Seconded, though I've found the HF Hercules wired line pretty comparable to Dewalt.
But there's a fair amount of inter-model variety within those four/five brands. My 12v Dewalt impact punches above its weight/price and I have two Bosch 18v drills, similar in form factor but one is frankly inferior quality.
And Mafell can be better than festool. Though different manufacturers tend to have different advantages.
Hilti makes some very large tools that if needed Festool does not have alternative. I have also seen a comparably priced Hilti drill/driver give up where a Makita kept going.
WOW I've never heard of festool and hilti but simple googling has turned up amazing stores of their customer service. Unfortunately it looks like they don't overlap completely in the types of tools Ryobi offers.
I really like Ryobi's 18V and 40V 'ecosystem'. Every time I am browsing Home Depot or their website, I come across new items that are compatible with these two ecosystems.
Just recently I saw everything from 18V Ryobi Glue Gun to a Portable Power washer that can suck water from a bucket (eliminating the need for a hose) to even a portable soldering iron! Hell they even got a boombox ha ha!
For the 40V I saw cool things such as a portable power generator, lawn mowers, wet dry vac and even a portable refrigerator.
Its really cool that there are like a bazillion things that your existing batteries can plug into.
Tools are weird like text editors where people get religious about some brands over others. But if your hustle is fencing the most reputable and easy-to-move tools, you would probably want to acquire the standard ones you see in Home Depot and Lowe's, such as Dewalt, Milwaukee, Craftsman, etc. Reputation-wise they're all about the same. Personally I like Makita.
I would say Festool is a brilliant system, but different manufacturers can make better tools for certain jobs. Mafell’s jigsaw is excellent, Metabo for grinders etc, Hilti SDS plus and Max.
Festool domino system I hear is probably the best, but that is rather specialized.
I spent hours researching the various pro-sumer level brands when upgrading my tool collection this winter. And settled on Milwaukee. Because red. Ok fine, their track saw played a part. But mostly red.
