That was the perfect demonstration, nicely chosen!
That also illustrates why we need to get rid of guns, and replace them with little robotic teddy bears with extensible springy legs and little air canisters inside that just entangle you in hugs.
Plus that way we can seed the world with ineffective weapons, make ‘Teddy Bear Herder’ the coolest job in the police force, and arm everybody with ineffective weapons.
Plus, bonus. . . you’ve got a positive pressure level V containment suit if you have a few of 'em handy!
(to be fair, the idea came from a CGI movie called Vexille because. . . well, turn the little white robots in your mind into little grapplers, and then how do you defend against THAT?)
Why did they have to split the action so much between the big robot herder and his little herd and the humans in robot suits?
Answer, because the herd would have been too effective on its’ own.
If they just sent in a bunch of little robots then the bad guys never have any people to shoot, and if the little robots grapple instead of kill. . . then that magic moment where somebody has a gun pointed at another person and somebody dies doesn’t happen anymore. There’s no way to defend against that, and it can be quite low tech.
Without that context, the violent aspects of policing end up greatly diminished. That makes the role attractive to a completely different sort of person.
There’s a story that’s been going around for a long time about Fred “Mister” Rogers’ car being stolen, then returned the following day with a note saying “Sorry, we didn’t know it was yours”.
Check it out on Snopes, the story was first printed in 1990 by The Wall Street Journal as having happened “two weeks ago”, then in 2004 several papers, including the St Louis Dispatch, wrote that it happened “a year or two before Rogers’ death” in 2003. Additionally, Mister Rogers never mentioned anything like this incident, so sadly, file under “Urban legend, too good to be true”.
I have a friend who went to Brown U in Rhode Island. His apartment was broken into and his stuff, such as a student collection of stuff might be, was taken. He talked to the building manager who told him not to worry. A few days later all of his stuff was back in his apartment. He asked the building manager what the hell happened, and got the strong intimation that he was renting space in a mob-owned building, and apparently you don’t break in and steal stuff from a mob-owned building, at least not in RI.
“These are tough times. A man can get a job, he might not look too close at what that job is. But a man learns all the details of a situation like ours, well… then he has a choice.”
You think that crooks who had enough morals to return to the scene of their crime - at great personal risk - to return their stolen wares would be interested in taking the personal information of rape victims or installing backdoors?
It’s unfortunate that “rape crisis” or “pregnancy crisis” centers can often be not what they appear: in the South particularly, they are chameleon-like organizations which mimic abortion/birth control services clinics, but are actually religious, anti-abortion indoctrination centers.
I going to guess that this place has called itself a “Sexual Assault Services” clinic to distinguish itself from the fake clinics.
“The police admitted they’d never heard of thieves returning property. It seems counter to their intentions.”
… and that’s where they go wrong. Thieves (like criminals) are not cartoon villains. It’s no ‘good’ vs ‘evil’. It’s people who commit crime of varying impact due to a vast range of reasons. Maybe they are addicts. Maybe they are homeless kids who steal in order to eat. Maybe they are bored. Maybe they are struggling. Who’s to say? Why does anyone steal? There are a million different responses to that question, and most of them would not negate a basic humanity on the part of the thief.
It’s also possible that they just wanted their banking details in order to deposit $10,000,000 in their account. Is it likely? No. Is it possible? Yes.
Does that adequately illustrate the futility and redundancy of your commentary? Or do I also have to ask why the hell anyone would want to steal or modify the data of rape victims &/or put spyware on their system?
To be fair, organized crime knows the value of treating people well.
Sure, it’s entirely self serving, manipulative, hypocritical, and in no way makes up for the evils they commit just as readily, but at least they know the value of it.
Don’t mess with the pros. If there’s an established crime organization in an area, don’t commit crimes anywhere near them or theirs.
Yup, also that. It’s fun to solve extra problems with an end-around, isn’t it? They can be designed to be ineffective, not terribly strong or dangerous, it’s kind of the opposite of the ‘I Robot’ scenario.
The biggest caveat is we really screw up some post-apocalyptic visions, but I’ll take that.
