> If we as a society are OK with qualified law enforcement looking the other way, then we're OK with passing the buck to the unqualified.
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.
That is an outcome, but not a particularly desirable one depending on the degree of pettiness and the frequency of these crimes. Interestingly if you loosen restrictions on self defense and maintain penalties for self-defense gone awry (I.e., your defense system injure an innocent person) then you’ll probably end up in a pretty good place.
Why are the as restrained as they are right now though? A state without a functioning law enforcement that is out to effectively protect citizens and actually enforcing laws is missing the point of being a state at all.
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.
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.