Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/31/a-carpenter-used-apple-airtags-to-find-his-stolen-tools-along-with-15000-others-video.html
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so the police had no idea what was going on until this guy put air tags into his tools, right? and after he lead them to these locations, they still don’t have any info on the thieves?
kinda crazy, no?
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There haven’t been any arrests yet but that doesn’t necessarily mean the police don’t have any info on the thieves, it just means they didn’t catch them red-handed at the storage facility. It could be that the police are building a case tying the suspects to the thefts and want to make sure they have enough to make charges stick to the right people (especially if the storage units wasn’t rented out under the suspects’ real names).
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It takes a special breed of scumbag to steal the tools on which a working class person’s livelihood depends. I hope they lock the thieves away for a long time.
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Seems like a lot more work to fence that many hot tools than to steal them in the first place.
“Hey buddy, wanna buy $5M worth of assorted used tools? They fell off the back of… a lot of trucks.”
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Nah, they just sell them and Amazon and eBay. I believe that’s one of the reasons small power tools are so cheap on those sites.
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Oh dang, yeah that makes sense. I mean that still sounds like a massive amount of work, but it beats drop shipping.
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Homeless people are probably hungry, so make sure you are not covered in mustard or mayo - you could get eaten by those scary homeless evil criminals who are no longer doing heroin.
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Way to punch down at people already down, dude.
Sounds like someone who needs help, actually. Maybe it’s scary for you, but he’s a human being. Maybe try to remember that.
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But hate crimes are up because…white guys?
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It’s amazing how widespread tool theft is. I read a fair number of stories like this, with organized tool theft rings that collect huge hauls. The amount of disorganized tool theft is high too, and brazen - my neighbor was working on his roof, with tools at the bottom of the ladder. Someone just happened to drive by, saw the tools, and had their kid jump out of the car to grab them and drive off before my neighbor could get back down the ladder.
Not really, when you consider that cops are actually really terrible at solving crimes, even really serious ones. Thefts at this level, they often don’t bother investigating. They’re looking at individual thefts, looking at the relatively low value of those thefts, and they’re not priorities. They’re not even thinking about the thefts possibly being part of something bigger. Only once someone else does the work, finds the stolen goods, they realize how big an operation it is, they start actually investigating (assuming the thieves haven’t been scared off at that point).
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this!
guy gets tools robbed twice, I assume the unsaid thing in the article is that the police took the report and did nothing – then stashes some airtags and is robbed again and he leads them to locations where they find “an estimated $3 million to $5 million” in stolen tools.
“The scope of the investigation is enormous and ongoing,”
but, there was no investigation until this guy spent his own money to buy some consumer tech and then get robbed a third time, THEN inform you where his stolen stuff was. right?
That MSN link has video of local news covering the press conference where some of the quotes from the story was pulled. IDK - this is giving: ‘ineptitude parading as effectiveness’ vibes. But maybe I’m just low blood sugar.
non paywalled version of full article available on MSN. can’t paste links, but just search for “MSN How a fed up carpenter found his stolen power tools — and 15,000 others Story by Paul Duggan” if you wanna read the full thang
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I didn’t realize weed causes biker gangs. 
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So the second time my current car was stolen, it was found abandoned in the middle of a street across town, full of power tools. There was a table saw and sawzall and sanders and drills and a nail gun and I don’t remember what else.
The cops asked me if the tools were mine and the investigation ended with that. No one tried to figure out who stole the car, or the tools, and no mention of the obvious that it was unlikely the first or last time.
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Not to mention that, once they had the thieves’ warehouse handed to them, they apparently just moved in and started cataloguing stuff instead of making any attempt to make it look untouched and catch the thieves when they returned from their next tool grab. Now, I’m no detective so I don’t want to second-guess them too much, maybe there was a good reason. But it reminds me uncomfortably of the time my parked car was totaled by a drunk who then fled and abandoned their vehicle, which was impounded… and then the next day they were allowed to pick it up. No arrest, no penalty, no questions asked. The police just couldn’t be bothered, apparently.
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The online version of the story I read had the police being unjustly self-congratulatory, when the crime solving had literally been a citizen DIY job.
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Said it before: criminals committing crimes driving their cars are the one kind of criminal the coppers and judges seem to feel real empathy for and feel capable of putting themselves in their shoes.
Also don’t know about round where you are but here they are too busy providing escorts to Nazis harassing people in libraries to deal with theft.
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You list a whole bunch of ways in which crime is substantially down, only to insist that crime is still up because some car manufacturers have introduced shoddy IoT devices into their products and because some unhoused people are acting erratically (though not necessarily illegally) in public spaces. Not a very convincing argument.
You’re probably not interested, but for those who are here are some stats on perception and reality.
There was an uptick in violent crime during the pandemic, but a lot of that is attributed to victims being stuck inside with abusive family members.
As for perceptions, my theory is that the subset of those citizens the cops think they should “protect and serve” has narrowed even more toward the wealthiest tranche of human and fictional persons, and more middle and upper middle class people are realising that the police really won’t do much when they’re the victims of property crime (let alone quality-of-life squalour issues).
It’s also interesting to note which “tough on crime” conservatives are eager to promote the false narrative that crime is increasing rather than to acknowledge the postitive effects of regulations they hate like lead reduction in gasoline and paint, no-fault divorce, and drug decriminalisation and harm reduction programmes.
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I certainly wouldn’t argue with the fact that they aren’t actually bothering; but what always puzzles me is the implied presumption that low-value thefts are one-offs; both because the economics often don’t make much sense unless there’s some specialization and economy of scale involved(less of a factor for things that are immediately useful or are cash/are utterly trivial to cash out; but more of a factor the more involved liquidating the loot is) and because people are very willing to believe(not without a fair amount of evidence; though often ahead of that evidence, or with a selective focus that the evidence doesn’t support) that some people are habitual offenders who do a lot of crime; and that a lot of the crime(especially the more impersonal stuff that is about exploiting opportunity rather than about reprisals for perceived slights or escalation of interpersonal conflicts) is committed or instigated by a comparatively small group of amoral professionals and constitutionally-incapable-of-playing-nice-with-others sorts.
Given the sheer density required to not suspect that something like the theft of a van full of tools is quite possibly the work of a serial offender(especially if you have multiple reports of similar crimes); I’m inclined to wonder if there’s…attitude…related to the cops’ perception of how people with large numbers of low level offenses are charged and sentenced; rather than an actual incapacity to believe in serial offenders and criminal organization.
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