They used my credit card at foot locker (~$500), The Store Manager confirmed two guys made the purchase and corporate said they would turn over the video if police just ask.

A month later the bank fraud dept informed me someone was trying to cash a fake check ($1,600) against my account at an ATM using my ID (stolen from the car) and they ATM video shows the guy and the would turn it over to police if they requested it.

I even emailed the detective with chain and all he had to do was reply all, but the detective refuses (“we don’t look into these things”). Meanwhile these people have my address and key (even though I rekeyed) they may be lurking and try to come in, and I should be entitled to know what these people look like.

I was attacked on HN for suggesting this but I’ll suggest it again, since the author of this post already had video of these theives, there needs to be a platform to post these videos for the public to crowdsource the identity of these people.

I know there are not police resources to pursue every amazon purchase, but in my case it was grand theft and it’s ongoing, and likely to escalate, but the police are unwilling to do anything to help (but be damn sure they’d look into it if they were the victims).

I found out about it on Nextdoor. I wasn't affected by it (I have my packages delivered to my work), but I watched the thread with interest.

The neighbors had cameras - they got good pictures of the vehicle, the woman who stole the packages, etc. Multiple neighbors did this, coordinating via Nextdoor.

Our community resource officer of our local PD station was also notified about this.

One even saw the car, followed her in her own vehicle, and got a license plate number, and called the police. The woman was arrested and everyone who had packages stolen by her gave the police their pictures or videos to help.

The case is still on-going; this only happened last week.

I have no doubt that if something like you describe doesn't exist, that someone can or will make it. What would be nice would be if the site also added similar "glitter bomb" kits (maybe simplified in some manner to make them less expensive) to upload for entertainment, and to help catch the thieves.

These people have no shame, and seemingly no sense or care that they are being watched. Everyone with a camera had signs saying they were filming 24/7 with security cams, but that didn't seem to matter.

My car was stolen last Friday night. It's on a car-share platform so the thief took the lockbox that's normally fitted to the window, bashed it open to get the key, and came back later for the vehicle. There is a very conspicuous warning on the lockbox that the car is fitted with two GPS units.

When I first reported the theft, police said all they can do is wait for the car to show up and provide a report for insurance purposes.

Then I checked the location via the car-share site. GPS updates were still working. When I called the police back to let them know I had a current location and could keep them updated in (almost) real time, it changed everything. Suddenly multiple cars were sent out while I kept reporting updates, and they managed to make an arrest within maybe 20 minutes.

It's great to see how a little technology can give victims a taste of vigilantism without endangerment.

If it made their car unsellable out their house miserable I'd call that a success and no one got hurt.

Whether a prosecutor and/or a jury would be interested in that argument is another story.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katko_v._Briney

And then what? Will the platform also have a portal that will let people en masse vex the local PD with messages containing links to the video until the precinct assigns an officer to the case?

What happens next? Is there going to be a timer or some kind of SLA on the platform that notifies people in the crowd "Sergeant Jones still hasn't found the bastard who stole from the Smith family down on the corner"?

Crowdsourcing criminal investigation, even a passive element of it like identifying mugs from home security footage seems like a rabbit hole I'm not sure we're prepared to go down (it also scares the bajeezus out of me because the general population, sorry to say this, aren't the rational actors I want involved in trying to identify perps so casually through 'platforms').

Well let me tell you of another event that occurred to me in 08/17.

I was kidnapped at gunpoint from a gas station, forced to drive my attacker with a gun on my for 30 minutes, eventually after getting off the highway I jumped out of my own car in gear, escaped and called the police.

First words out of the sergeants mouth responding, “cut the shit what really happened.” Despite my insistence I’m an officer of the court myself (attorney at Law) that there will be video from the gas station to prove my version of events, I was even told, “we aren’t even sure if you own a car and if you are just calling police for a free ride.”

In that case, in 24 hours I located my car and the gunman and called the police and had him arrested. That’s not to say I did this voluntarily, luckily the gunman connected my WiFi only iPad to the internet and I got the location, of course I called the police first, who told me “they heard about my ‘story’ yesterday, and wouldn’t be going to the address until I drove to the station and showed them the Apple email”. I did just that and after keeping me in the parking lot for an hour and laughing at me 2 officers came out to me (this station was closed on Sunday) and took down the address, drive away and called my cellphone and told me go home they don’t see my car. Unsatisfied I went to the address myself, found my car and the gunman, called the police yet again and they finally came and arrested him.

He bonded out Monday at 8AM. He has since been rearrested, bonded out yet again, rearrested yet again for violation of his bond vis—Avis his GPS tracker I insisted on.

His trial is still ongoing. Someone stole my keys and ID, I should be entitled to know what they look like when 2 videos are available, crimes against me are ongoing, and the cost of the officers time (since you are so concerned about their $150/hour rates...which seem entirely made up, no offense) is a 1 minute reply to an email I forwarded him from foot locker loss prevention.

Edit: I forgot my conclusion, which is, people who engage in these activities in many cases will even have friends and family who turn them in (i.e. the unibomber). But even if they don’t a public platform would be very helpful in deterring these activities, which is the ultimate goal.

First impressions matter a lot when it comes to bureaucracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity

Additionally, police have no legal duty or obligation to protect or investigate.

  that's crap.

Unless you own a lot of property, you still can’t expect much from the police in the USA.

In India. Police supplies thieves with information. Guards the scene while the theft is ongoing. Shares the spoils, and then harasses the complainer. And to put it mildly this is like a low key operation I just described. They do a lot lot more.

It's like an extended branch of the mafia. Most sought after jobs in India after civil services.

Recently in Bangalore a police guy was caught on cam stealing a journalists scooter.

I used to think the USA was a "safe" place. Maybe it is compared to Somalia but it isn't compared to Japan or Singapore. Once I got used to the safety of these places I never feel safe in the USA anymore.

I used just take it for granted there were bad parts of town and that even in the good parts of town I should be leery of people, avoid dark alleys etc. Don't walk alone at night, etc. Then I lived in these other places where that concept mostly doesn't exist.

As a concrete example it's common sense in the USA if I get a 3rd party car stereo I should get a removable car stereo and always take it out or hide it. I had 5 of them stolen and my car once and just took it all as "sucks but that's that way life is, my fault for forgetting to take the stereo out or not buying a lojack". But it's not the way life is. It's the way we've let it become.

There's lots of other examples and AFAIK most of it is cultural. An example, find a dropped wallet. In USA/Europe a large percentage of people have the attitude "score for me! found free money!" Not sure if that percentage is 20% or 80% but in Japan (and I think Singapore) the more common response is "OMG, someone is really going to be in a tough spot. I'd better try to get this back to them if possible". In the USA even if people had that attitude they might rationalize that the police won't care and it might be true the police don't care which is just another symptom of the same problem.

I have no clues how to spread the nicer culture to the West. It seems the opposite "me me me" culture is impossible to fight.

PS: these kinds of posts always illicit irrelevant responses of the problems in Japan and Singapore. I'm not saying Japan and Singapore are perfection. I'm only pointing out this one area where they do better.

That being said, I wouldn't throw all of Europe in with them in this case. I lost my wallet for the first time a few months ago in Prague. The ones who found it went through the effort of finding my contact information (I only had my student ID in my wallet, no contact information whatsoever, my mistake) and when we met up and it was returned to me all the money was still in it.

Although that is only one personal case, I spent around 5 months touring 15 different countries in Europe and witnessed people leaving laptops at the coffee shop unwatched and just leaving their bikes completely unsecured in front of the subway entrance as part of their commute, which are both pretty strong signals that many of those nations share a culture where theft simply isn't common.

Swipes like that break the HN guidelines. Can you please edit them out of what you post here? Your comment would be better without that sentence, and maybe also the patronizing bit at the end ("these kinds of posts always illicit irrelevant responses").

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What you (the global "you") experience in the world and the results of your interaction are not a template, and other people's experiences may sometimes preclude them from truly realizing, appreciating and unpacking why people in other social groups might see interactions with the constabulary (keeping in context with this comment thread) or other systems of society a bit differently.

As a matter of personal perspective, the suggestion to break one's bubble isn't a swipe, but a request to entertain the thought that one's preconceived notions about a given affair might change with the knowledge that their experiences are not universal and exposure to a different angle.

Maybe the curt nature of the suggestion doesn't meet some arbitrary ideal of discussion, but that doesn't invalidate the root point of the suggestion.

Matter of perspective, no, Dan? Would it have been less of a pejorative to borrow a phrase from the latest incantation of our discussions of race and culture in the US to say "check your privilege?"

Granted this isn't the place for a protracted discussion on dialogue here, I just find the strong reaction to what is a very important clarion call to evaluate ones own biases and experiences against a spectrum of biases and experiences shared by every other human being, however curt or brief, taking it the point of calling it a "pejorative" an interesting reaction-IMO.

Maybe I should have left it out or maybe written something else like "Is it possible you're experiencing the world in a bubble?". In any case too late to edit (the option does not appear)

It's definitely a matter of interpretation. But the online medium is fragile, and if one person (me in this case) reads it as a swipe, usually a lot do.

Why is the solution to more gun violence more guns?

If I'm unarmed, then I'm likely to be safe, even if I do get robbed.

Armed victim is more trouble for perpetrator so they will find easier prey. Most crimes aren’t specific but are opportunistic. If you’re a crackhead with a gun or whatnot do you stick up the crazy with a gun on their belt? Or wait 5 minutes for an unarmed victim?

This seems like such simple logic that it surprises me that I frequently hear arguments like yours.

I think that a ccw will not help against a hitman. But it sure helps against crackheads.

I'd much rather choose an increase in the chance of having my possessions stolen (the chances of getting caught in this crime are pretty small anyway), than an increase in the chance I get shot.

Plus, by taking the "don't carry a gun" route, you can increase legal restrictions on guns. Gun control won't stop hitmen either, but crackheads in the UK don't have firearms.

Since I'm not a rational long term thinker, I shoot my victim and take the wallet from the body, why give them a chance to shoot back?. This is the end result of the arms race you advocate for.

Crackheads aren’t random, they have some reasoning.

I’ve had a lot of experience with crackheads and robbing an armored car and a random care aren’t equally likely to them. Again, a crackhead doesn’t want to rob a particular person. They just want money.

The bear doesn’t want to eat you. They just want to eat someone.

It's a nice justice boner but it doesn't mean this is the usual outcome.

Especially without military training like this guy had.

2. It's true that when we talk about life and death situations there are many ugly outcomes. It is, however, not clear that the ugly is the most common outcome when a law-abiding gun owner is involved. This is due to the fact that records are more than likely made when someone is shot, but not necessarily if one deters an assailant with a weapon.

Now, granted, many police officers don’t have anywhere near as much gun training than your average NRA member, but I submit they still have way more training with guns than the average person on the street.

Given that, I can’t see how the solution to the gun problem is by having more guns.

You’re confusing open carry with concealed carry.

  the number one way that police officers get shot/killed is by having their own gun taken away

Yes, it's a "rabbit hole [we're] not sure we're prepared to go down". We're not prepared. We're going down it

You're excluding the admittedly somewhat bleak but still quite plausible third alternative: we as a society are in practice OK with this class of crime going largely unprosecuted.

The legitimate authorities are resource constrained, the political process isn't prepared to allocate sufficient resources to change that, and the societal costs of allowing vigilanteism and extrajudicial punishment are broadly believed to outstrip the scope of the problem they would ostensibly be solving. This leads to an equilibrium where a lot of petty theft goes unpunished and we, as a society, are in practice content to accept it that way.

Money: Reduce spending overseas by cutting down drastically on operations outside the nation's borders.

Education: Establish longer training, covering more in-depth the actual goals of law enforcement, effective strategies in community engagement, de-escalation tactics, psychology and the justice system.

Respect: Integrate law enforcement back into the communities they are supposed to serve. Reduce the barriers, demilitarize law enforcement from the look, equipment and the strategies employed all the way to the mindset of the law enforcement officials. Citizens (all humans in fact) should be viewed more like customers than like potential perpetrators.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc make for valid public policy it does not.

What source do you point to that we as a society are OK with qualified law enforcement looking the other way?

One of my exes is certain what to do, which is why she’s campaigning for the fourth largest political party in America.

Me, I could work on AI to fully enforce all laws, but I suspect that would have unfortunate side effects like accidentally returning to feudalism after all but a few thousand Americans end up with multiple millennia of prison time because the laws themselves are overbroad… and if I limit it to just laws I agree with, well that’s exactly the sort of thing I would be appalled by if done by someone with whom I disagreed about which laws were just.

What should we do, do you recon?

It is also official policy to not investigate theft below of $500, unless special circumstances. Because of this many stores has refused to file police reports, which the state statisticians then complained on national news since that limits their ability to make accurate reports to the politicians on how much crime exist.

Because it's all well and good when the crowd gets it right and the lynch mob goes to town on the bad guy. But the issue is when that mob gets turned on the wrong guy. The internet has a long memory and seldom admits when it is wrong. "Bob Jerry is the Boston Marathon bomber" sticks around much longer than "Whoops, our bad, Bob Jerry is just some dude"

Name-and-Shame systems usually relies on unverified complains: One can "identify" the wrong individual or someone can make a fake complain - In both situations someone's reputation will be damaged, sometimes boyond repair.

That's why police should take care of this. They are supposed to be unbiased, run propper investigation and do proper verification. The fact that they don't do that is a different problem.

Before you argue something like "lets verify those complains", Let me put in a different way: If you keep playing the if-that-do-that game, at the end you are going to see that we have basically two options: Live in a system where lots of criminals goes to jail but more inocents gets falsely implicated, or one where we get less false-positives but we also miss some criminals.

Modern society has chosen the second option for a reason.

We've been doing that for hundreds of years, so if there is a rabbit hole, we're at the bottom of it.

My position on this is, if we're talking about being frustrated with the police not generating the outcomes we want from petty theft, and if we're also experiencing gnashing of teeth and tearing of sackcloth aimed at tech companies for things ranging from data breaches to questionable ethics and corporate responsibility (and in some cases, but certainly not all-with seeming impunity), why on earth would we ever conjoin the two roles like this?

If it's something that ordinary citizens can solve, it's something that the police should be able to solve. It's their job, it's a crime with real victims, there's no excuse not to do anything.

And there are plenty of stories about police arresting people on trivial issues, questionable charges, there's stuff about how they shoot black people over nothing, there's civil forfeiture. But actual theft? That is what the police should be working on. If they don't, what are they for?

This is what Reddit tried to do with the Boston bombing.

How do you handle deep fakes?

You prohibit the police from making warrantless arrests for misdemeanors that did not occur in their presence, so they no longer have the power to do that in most cases.

Which is one reason for the lack of action that this vigilante system is proposed to remedy, so, again, how do you deal with the public going after the wrong people?

In part, I understood this. While the personal loss was significant to me, the dollar amount was only a few thousands that insurance covered. Nobody was hurt. No guns were stolen.

In fact, those were two of the first questions I was asked: "Do you have any guns?", and "Were there any company files on the laptop?"

On the other hand, a couple of days later, I found that a piece of paper left on the floor held a perfect if light image in dirt of a sneaker sole that did not match my shoes and I was pretty sure did not match the patrolmens' footwear. So I called the detective and left a message, and followed up once. He didn't even bother to respond.

I mention this, because people should understand, to the extent they don't already: Police "triage" their cases. And for many of those cases, it doesn't matter that a crime was committed. They are putting their time, energy, and political capital towards other things. (They have their own workplaces to deal with, including reciprocity and the need to build their careers. Whether or not you agree with the system (as an insider or an outsider seeking services), it's how things work.)

P.S. That sucks, Will. I can relate to how frustrating that must be. And in my case, a bit more attention might have meant less people ultimately burgled.

Not anymore, they just robbed me!

"Were there any company files on the laptop?"

I don't know, it's fucking gone!

This reminds me of the "hack" I've seen posted here before about preventing the TSA from going through your luggage --- pack it with a gun.

Not sure what your options are - move to a relatively wealthy suburb probably with a well funded police department where they might not be lazy enough to investigate?

This is how neighborhoods "go downhill" as they say. Car break-ins were a major decision for us to move out that town.

What would you say is a good measure of an effective police officer?

Would you say percentage of closed cases? Because that's what leads to this.

Would you say, the number of crimes reported per capita? Because that's what leads to this.

It's unlikely you'll find these people or catch them on average. You may get them for something else and be able to close several cases at once, but the truth is you'll just never see them again. So if you take the report and open a case, your numbers look bad. Crime per capita is up, percentage of closed cases goes down.

I'm sorry, but the US is still the wealthiest country in the world, and the only reason why car theft is so rampant in SF is the police and DA complete inability to prosecute against it.

I'm not smart enough to come up with solutions but there has to be something better than police unaccountable to anyone without excessive amounts of capital to effectively waste.

Assuming the video in OP is genuine the thieves, IIRC, are pretty well off. They certainly have assets that could be forfeit -- nice cars, comfy furniture, smartphones, etc..

These people don't appear to be stealing through necessity.

Lots of possibilities. Don't even need a lawyer if going into small, claims court with video from something they stole. Only thing that concerned me was the confetti and fart bomb possibly counting as battery, booby traps, or whatever. I'd probably just set it to record and track even though other stuff was hilarious.

Also, to reply to your parent - Heinlein recommended public flogging. I believe it's criminally underused.

This sort of gets at your idea of a platform to identify people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_subpoena

Call an attorney!

I've had a similar experience to yours, having my back window smashed out and wallet stolen. luckily we have camera's for our property and were able to get a license # and had our own footage to provide the police with. I wonder if that's why it was taken more seriously.

In your shoes I would tell the police you are being targeted & feel unsafe. that might trigger a better response which isn't entirely untrue. It's not like these people are oversea's they are in your city.

The police in the USA of course have no legal obligation to investigate or protect, contrary to popular understanding. Sovereign/qualified immunity really needs to be scaled back.

Yup, they’re fucked. But you have the time, so you aren’t.

It’s a dumb, bullshit game, but it is what it is.

If they wont even bother with the most non-controversial of crimes, what makes you think they have the moral gumption to not do that to get rid of an annoyance?

Why are they allowed to have a policy like this? They should be properly funded and staffed, and then they should start doing their damn homework.

Seriously people: your car is not secure storage.

Same reason it is OK to tell people that avoiding smoking reduces their chances of getting lung cancer or that wearing a condom reduces their change of STDs, but it is not OK to tell someone with lung cancer that it is their fault for smoking or to tell someone with an STD that it is their fault for not wearing a condom.

If anyone's right to identity and self-expression is exemplified by keeping wallet and keys in their car, then, yes, I suppose they should certainly assert their rights by keeping valuables in their car!

It’s essentially free to anyone who can MITM your connection.

He didn't say "Hide your stuff better", he said "Don't treat your car like secure storage".

Law and justice are very complicated and have a massive impact on lives and society which is why we entrust a few authorized members to carry out enforcement. That doesn't mean we don't have problems with bad police, lack of resources, or politics - but the solution is to fix those areas, not crowdsource criminal justice.

No, what you need is a functioning police force. Not vigilante justice.

Edit: You could also make a public platform where you would crowdsource generating the political pressure to make the police work better, as well as monitoring them for doing their jobs. This has the advantage that the people put in the spotlight have a public function already, and that it's a more democratic process.

The main problem I have with your proposal is that it results in the doxxing and witch hunt of people caught on camera and even if mostly effective/just, this will eventually backfire because of the thirst for revenge and spectacle and because we can't have nice things.

so, the chances of my package being stolen and my car being broken into vs. the chances of being publicly misidentified as a package/car thief. Loss of $10-$10000 vs. ruined life. I'll definitely take the former.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...

Then... what the hell are they for?!?! That is utterly insane.

Just how it works. It's how it always worked. The "Protect and Serve" is just marketing. There's definitely plenty of cops that are about that, though. Even some that don't care will risk their lives protecting people because it's part of their job enforcing the law as their supervisors or police chiefs order them. It's all pretty complicated.

In pro-gun areas, we are already operating with this assumption, though. That ruling just reinforced what many of us already believed and sometimes experienced. Each American is responsible for their own safety before anything or anyone else helps them. Each living person is responsible for deciding their own risk avoidance or tolerance in their various systems since there's no guarantee the system can protect them without their own action. It's up to use first and foremost.

The police (and government agents more generally) are not legally responsible to victims for decisions not pursue crimes, or not to prevent predictable future crimes.

Crime certainly happens everywhere, no place is immune altogether, but it should never be an everyday occurrence.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/The-Scanner-San-Fr...

https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/products/storage-furniture/outdoo...

You don't even need a lock for it. If you can get the deliverymen to consistently place packages in it, the thieves will have no idea if there's actually a package at your door to steal or not without actually attempting a theft. For extra deterrence, you can install a motion activated camera next to it. The idea is to reduce the thieves' expectation of reward while increasing their expectation of getting caught.

  Shaftway
  Place in Bench - Code 1234
  24601 Where I Live St.
  My City, ST, ZipZipZip

I have a sign low on my door right where a deliveryman would leave a package that asks him to put it in the box (with a simple message in big text, a big red arrow pointing towards the box and a photo of it with a package inside). There's no lock to get in his way.

Deliverymen from all carriers use my box about 90% of the time they want to deliver to my doorstep.

For Amazon specifically (since their deliverymen are gig workers), I entered address-specific delivery instructions into their system, mainly so I could complain about their performance more effectively. I think the actual, physical sign is more effective.

I have a camera watching the porch and have a few videos of deliverymen doing a double-take on the sign, then putting the package in the box.

Contrast to that - before I moved to this house, my old UPS guy used to honk and wave if he saw me walking down the street, knew me by name and would knock every time.

Wow. I really wonder what the environmental impact is of just one household doing this. I think I order something once every.. two months maybe? Three? And if I could get the desired electronics in a local store, I probably would.

Edit: To reply to the three initial comments at once, I see your point. I was thinking "but it's not just about the last mile, it's about getting that package all the way from China or where ever it comes from"... but of course, if I buy it in a store, it still had to come from china. Someone driving to your home all day seems terrible at first impression, but even without grouping the deliveries, I guess it might not be much worse than someone who gets groceries by car. I'd be interested to hear about research that looked into the topic.

Compared to someone who is super frugal, list driven, plans ahead, has one trip a month to get necessities, and grows their food in their yard, sure, it's more impactful.

Perspective always matters.

That's being disingenuous. There are plenty of more moderate options which are perfectly viable for the vast majority of households, like planning a small amount know advance and getting essentials twice a week, or integrating it into other trips (commuting, school runs, coffee runs, walks).

>coffee runs

Can't you just brew coffee yourself if you care about the enviromental impact?

You didn't state it, at least not as of this writing, but the responses are about gas/emissions waste of individual trips to the store. For that home delivery is probably break even.

There's also the aspect of individual delivery packaging. All that cardboard, foam, plastic and tape vs store delivery which are palletized and bulk packaged.

Couldn't you make the argument that the distance being traveled for OP's packages is only the distance between the package immediately before and after his package?

The product is getting delivered to your house both ways, it's just that one is by you and the other isn't. It's not as bad as you make it seem.

I wish there was a way to centralize it into a single staging area for the region and then deliver things in batches, but that won't satisfy the "I NEED IT ASAP" kinds of people.

The incentive structure simply isn't set up to reward a delivery driver taking that extra effort. In fact, it explicitly punishes it.

Biggest reason to leave a package at the driveway is a fence/gate. A fence keeps stuff in or out, either way, not respecting that is how you end up with stories like this: https://www.khq.com/news/responders-ram-driveway-gate-to-sav...

However, this did result in one of the delivery drivers not correctly counting how many from the end our townhouse was and put it on the wrong porch...

That plus a grassy slope is enough to hide the packages from street view.

Our neighbor across the street gets their packages stolen often. I have never had any package stolen, and I order 100x times as many packages.

"Carrier Service - Place package in box, take a candy, and remove this note."

Delivery people don't have time to care. They aren't even reading the labels you know.

Of course that might make a code lock more important.

You have something tantamount to public/private key cryptography going on there!

Back to the video, I observed that a lot of the thieves talk to themselves out loud. They probably refer to themselves in the third person when talking to someone. Clearly they can't think before they open their mouths, something people should master being able to do as a ten year old. Maybe the only time they think is when they open their mouths, thinking and talking being the same thing to them.

If the secret shadowy people that rule the world in some conspiracy really had plans to depopulate the world then they should get the NSA to track everyone that talks to themselves, select these folk for the depopulation program and then this theft from doorsteps problem would be gone.

While I think your suggestion would reduce the chance of theft, I think you overestimate the accuracy of the risk-benefit analysis happening in the thieves' minds, as well as the actual risk involved.

I mean, the activity is already dumb from a risk analysis point of view.

But if they don't know of a package, they won't try to steal it. That is the area that I do think would do well.

Further to that point, I haven’t even needed to provide evidence of stuff having been stolen. Which seems like a system ripe for abuse but it’s nice that it’s weighted in the customers favour for a change.

Thankfully I’ve not needed to complain about stolen stuff in a long while, partly because generally stuff is tossed over a fence or left with neighbors. But mostly because I now live in a quiet village so I don’t get the same kind of passing opportunists like I did when I lived on a busy school road.

That said, I seldom see or have stuff left outside in the UK - assuming no 'if out' instruction - the vast majority of the time it's a 'sorry we missed you' note or occasionally with a neighbour/over the wall.

https://www.google.com/amp/amp.wftv.com/news/local/seasonal-...

If they trail too closely, they'll make the deliveryman suspicious.

Call the police, obviously. Everyone has a mobile telephone these days.

Doing so even makes sense from a business perspective, as the carrier may have to pay the insurance on all the stolen packages.

This is backed by research. For example: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-22270052

[1]: Artificial surveillance cues do not increase generosity: two meta-analyses https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Psychological deterrence.