Pick a position! It is too harsh or too light? You’re gonna exhaust yourself moving those goalposts.
I’ll take a deviation from perfectly proportional (which would require the bike owners to steal something of equal value from the thief) of maybe +/- 10% over the massive over-reach of putting the would-be thieves in the hospital or maybe the morgue.
Ok. I don’t think that is perfectly proportional, since it doesn’t take into account who started that shit in the first place, the probability of the thief being caught, or the fact that relative value is in the eye of the beholder, especially for used goods.
If you wanted to take that tack, I’d say that making the thief pay the cost of replacement divided by the proportion of thefts that are solved (e.g. if 1% of thefts are solved, it would be replacement value * 100) would be all right for a first offense, but if the keep doing it after that, you need to move it way up.
As I said before, I think proportional is the minimum required to stop it from happening again. If it keeps happening (especially with the same person) then the response is still not proportional, and needs to be stronger.
Criminology studies have shown that the severity of punishment has little deterrent effect. Likelihood of getting caught is a much greater deterrent.
Are you looking for a deterrent or payback? Yes, yes, you don’t like violence, that’s not you, yadda yadda yadda. But why are you defending this couple? They fucked up.
If you don’t like the hose/camera idea, (which at least would have given the couple their YouTube yucks) what’s your solution?
It turns out that for fixed (cost of getting caught) * (probability of getting caught), upping the probability is far, far more able to deter criminals.
I’m not looking for deterrent from doing it the first time, because people aren’t very good at learning from other people’s mistakes, so that’s not really practical. I’m looking for deterrent from the same person doing it a second time, which has a lot of overlap with payback.
That’s what books are for. “People” are actually pretty good at it.
Alright. Here’s a plan:
(does this sound familiar?)
What you’ve done is create a brilliant deterrent. You’ve made them wonder, are they going to get a visit from the cops? If they consider stealing something again, they have to think, “is someone watching me? I couldn’t tell last time.” You also generate an instinctive, gut-level anxiety that, this time, what hits them might be nastier than water, or noise, or a jump scare.
Plus, you’ve got documentation of it to file with the police report. Even if the police don’t take action, you’ve got it recorded in case the thief does return. You haven’t put yourself in harm’s way; you haven’t harmed the thief (except maybe make them wet themselves - hopefully you’ve documented that!); you haven’t hurt them in a way that makes them seek revenge (see one of the articles I linked above); and you’ve not just deterred them from returning, you’ve deterred them from stealing other people’s stuff.
That’s all hypothetically, but as Turnah showed, it works on cats…
Sorry. Zero chance that ”police suck so let’s go vigilante on folks because hey, our beating is so much better than the prison system” is going to fly on this forum, for reasons that, frankly, should be blatently obvious.
Cut it out.
Having a video screen popup with Rickroll would be acceptable.
The couple that says “put your teeth on the curb” together, goes to jail together.
This is all kinds of gross, and I’m sure we’re going to see this elsewhere, except in a place like Florida with shitty gun laws and someone will end up dead.
No, fucked up is when you see someone stealing your bike and let your emotions get away with you. This pair set out lures, so they could commit violence and share it with all their friends, multiple times. It’s sheer luck that they are serial assaulters instead of serial killers. And the neighbors were merely concerned about the property values.
I disagree with your position, but even if I didn’t, this wasn’t taking violent action to defend property. It was deliberately engineering a situation to brutally assault people, and making a show of it to boot. The morality of their victims is beside the point. They manufactured a situation in which to commit their own predation. In much more basic terms, they were pissed off that they’d had their bikes stolen in the past and they couldn’t harm those thieves, so they laid a honeypot to satisfy their bloodlust. They’re fortunate their tantrum didn’t cost any lives.
I really hope someone with a strong background in criminal law comments on this post, because the implications of the felony murder rule here are pretty fascinating, because you kind of have a nested series of (potential) felonies playing out in sequence.
The first crime is that of the baiters: Conspiracy to Commit Assault with a Deadly Weapon and Conspiracy to Commit Battery.
Then the thief is guilty of Theft by Larceny. Whether this is Petty or Grand theft is determined by the value of the goods stolen.
Then we have the actual commission of Assault with a Deadly Weapon and Battery.
Everything mentioned above (except Petty Theft) can be prosecuted as either a misdemeanor or a felony. So, if someone died in all this (either the thief, or, if the thief defended himself, one of the baiters), how would the felony murder law play out?
This isn’t a rhetorical question. I have no idea and would love an answer.
That’s nice they could be achieving rapport with police instead of beggaring 60 thief beataways with 0 cop coverage, thanks, etc. I hope the Orrey represents them well in court.
So I keep my bike under a powered drawbridge with a cutout…
So if the bike gets jostled, the three floodgates close and the one on the lake side…
So by keeping the bikes as a part of a kinetic sculpture which don’t stop for nobody else (and is 97% bamboo swords)…
So my bike is pretty safe because of the minecarts racing community and powered tracks we installed…
The neighbors…were they supposed to take a turn with glass batts (fiberglass) instead?
Incidentally are buckwheat hull pillows made of hemp strong enough to strap to your feet and pad quietly out after bike thieves?
Think of all the times they talked about putting a bandstand full of hungry cougars under the bikes, that would pop up and busk for alms (or end up eating thieves in kind of a bad scene.) But how long is the musical part, etc…
Should I be at least putting a false loJack on bikes that’s a den of diatomaceous earth? Or is that plus a protective Trump Caterpillar (with the thaumaturgin spines) a minimum? And the GPS lojack (even if it doesn’t disengage engines or blow airbags, being on a bike rather than a car…or motorbike jacket.) Or I could park on an area treated with that super slippery stuff for low-water toilets…nah.
I didn’t know that Gru had a sister.
Because, Visalia.
Note the word “felony.” In California the threshold for felony theft is something valued at $950 or more. Maybe these people were using nice bait bikes worth that much, but if these bikes were run-of-the-mill types from Target or Walmart then the theft would have been a misdemeanor, not a felony.
New RING Doorbell Camera is available with a surface-to-air missile option.
Without condoning the violence, I would say the bike thieves deserved retribution of some kind.
I don’t think anyone is arguing they should go unpunished.
But, specifically by vigilantes, with potentially lethal baseball bats? That strikes me as the question here, and I’d answer it, “no.”
Perhaps a more fitting punishment would be to make the perpetrators walk to their community service assignments. Of course, I agree with you on unnecessary use of excessive force.
