> In 2023, the Texas Legislature unanimously passed a law raising auto insurance costs for Texans by $1 to combat rampant catalytic converter theft.
> The Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority, led by a board mostly appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, has turned the $1 fee hike into at least 3,200 Flock cameras.
More coming. Meanwhile, secure your EV!!! Batteries will be next!!!
> Texas law allows you to use deadly force to protect property if you would be justified in using force, and you reasonably believe it is immediately necessary to prevent the imminent commission of specific enumerated property crimes. These are arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, theft during the nighttime, or criminal mischief during the nighttime.
> Sec. 9.42. DEADLY FORCE TO PROTECT PROPERTY. A person is justified in using deadly force against another to protect land or tangible, movable property:
> (1) if he would be justified in using force against the other under Section 9.41; and
> (2) when and to the degree he reasonably believes the deadly force is immediately necessary:
> (A) to prevent the other's imminent commission of arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, theft during the nighttime, or criminal mischief during the nighttime; or (B) to prevent the other who is fleeing immediately after committing burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, or theft during the nighttime from escaping with the property; and
> (3) he reasonably believes that:
> (A) the land or property cannot be protected or recovered by any other means; or (B) the use of force other than deadly force to protect or recover the land or property would expose the actor or another to a substantial risk of death or serious bodily injury.
Deadly force can be lawful in Germany as well, reading Texas law I wonder which nuances of the laws make the biggest difference (assuming there's one).
Could also be that the difference comes from owning land works differently in Germany (because it's much more densely populated) and of course owning anything except small guns is completely forbidden.
people freqently conflate Stand Your Ground vs Duty to Retreat... with the entire rest of the debate.
I'm trying to keep this neutral, so I'm using a rather cut and dry example: Somebody kicks in your door with a pump action and starts shooting- There are _some_ jurisdictions that require you to try and flee. You kill them and they werent bodily blocking your car in? Murder charge. investigation finds a sabatoged engine? Doesn't matter.
Stand Your Ground assumes reasonableness and codifies leaveing the fight or flee decision up to the individual.
> Somebody kicks in your door with a pump action and starts shooting- There are _some_ jurisdictions that require you to try and flee. You kill them and they werent bodily blocking your car in? Murder charge.
Which jurisdictions? Is this in the US? I’ve lived in a bunch of European countries and in none would you be charged with murder in that situation.
Germany has had some weird court decisions in that regard, in general the law does say flee and not shoot back if this is an option. But mostly courts are reasonable and do not punish the victim. Only if the victim decides to use violence after the threat is over
But there was even a case, where a hells angel shot a police officer in his home who were doing a raid - and got free (because they did not identify themself as police).
The law says your are allowed to stand your ground. You don't have to flee.
> But there was even a case,
I don't know the details of the case, but if somebody thought some criminals are raiding his house with guns and it's reasonable the he thought that, then he's fully within his rights to defend himself and, depending on the necessities, by shooting at them.
If someone comes through your home door guns akimbo in the US, blasting back is fine
US Supreme court has often leaned heavily on right to protect self in one's own home in ruling against local and state laws that might ban ridiculous things.
Your example isn't quite as cut-and-dry because in a lot of cases that's going to involve the Castle Doctrine as well, and "starts shooting" means there is an actual danger merely than a perceived potential danger.
Counter-example: You're walking on the streets, at night, in the "bad part" of town. Someone walks towards you with their hands in their pockets, and their head covered with a hoodie. They say "Hey, what are you doing here?". You perceive this to be a threatening situation and fear for your life. Are you supposed to: a) pull out your gun and shoot them, or b) run away?
Some proponents of Stand Your Ground would say that option A is perfectly fine, some proponents of Duty To Retreat would say that you must attempt option B first, and fall back to option A only as a last resort.
First off- Texas has an explicit law making copper and catalytic converter theft a "Jail felony"- but if you break any other laws on the way, it's upgraded to a class 3 felony. See: https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/?tab=1&code=PE&chapter=PE... And. if you really want to play cops and robbers, a personally witnessed jail felony seems to be enough for a citzen's arrest.
Second: "(B) the use of force other than deadly force to protect or recover the land or property would expose the actor or another to a substantial risk of death or serious bodily injury." - YOU HAVE TO BE AFRAID FOR YOUR LIFE Texas gives citizens enourmous latitude in these matters, but it's not carte blanche for murder.
I can’t see a catalytic converter theft on a car parked on the street as burglary. Parked in a (private) garage? Yes, burglary. Parked on the street? No.
So, daytime theft of a converter from a car parked outside wouldn’t qualify I don’t think.
No, the driveway wouldn't count. Texas doesn't define burglary by property boundaries; you have to enter a "building" or a "habitation", and a habitation must be a "structure" or a "vehicle".
Are you sure that doesn't qualify on the basis that it is the curtilage of your home? Often this counts as "in your dwelling" because it's in your private space that immediately accompanies the dwelling.
If you sleep in the car it will qualify no matter where you're parked. This also appears to be true of an RV or any vehicle that clearly accommodates sleeping.
For reference:
"Burglary" under the Texas penal code is defined by entering a habitation or any portion of a building that is not open to the public, either with the intent to commit a crime, or when followed by the actual commission of, or the attempt to commit, a crime.
"Robbery" is theft in which the thief causes an injury to someone else. (Or intentionally threatens to do so.)
"Theft" is what it sounds like.
Most notably burglary need not include any element of theft. I feel like it's a mistake for the legal code to distinguish between what are fully interchangeable terms in the language the code is supposedly written in.
On topic for this particular comment, "habitation" is specifically defined to include vehicles "adapted for the overnight accommodation of persons".
> I feel like it's a mistake for the legal code to distinguish between what are fully interchangeable terms in the language the code is supposedly written in.
I’ve thought about this too. They often vary from state to state as well. But the alternative would be to create new legal terms, which would be more confusing, or use just use numbers, which would be hard for laypeople to discuss.
> But the alternative would be to create new legal terms, which would be more confusing, or use just use numbers, which would be hard for laypeople to discuss.
Well, compare homicide, which in popular culture is divided into "murder in the first degree", "murder in the second degree", and "murder in the third degree" alternately known as "manslaughter".
It's not clear to me whether you consider those "new legal terms" or "just using numbers", since in my eyes they are terms invented for the purpose of the law, distinguished from each other by numbers.
But they appear to be superior to the division between "burglary", "robbery", and "theft" either way. They have no preexisting meaning (unlike "burglary" and "robbery", which are used in spite of existing contradictory meaning) and they cause no difficulties in discussing the crimes, which we can be certain of because these terms already exist and people discuss them all the time.
In the Texas penal code, homicide is actually divided into "murder", "capital murder", "manslaughter", and "criminally negligent homicide".
These are clearly "new terms" rather than "numbers". They seem pretty straightforward: "murder" is defined in harmony with its natural English-language meaning. "Capital murder" is a variety of murder that allows for capital punishment. "Manslaughter" is homicide caused recklessly rather than intentionally, and is in harmony with the popular understanding of the word "manslaughter". And "criminally negligent homicide" is homicide caused negligently rather than intentionally, and that's also in harmony with the normal construction of noun phrases in English.
If we were instead to give those four categories names that nobody without special training was even capable of distinguishing from one another -- as Texas has already done for "burglary", "robbery", and "theft" -- what would improve? I submit that that would make some things worse while making nothing better.
Compare also the popular-culture division between "assault" and "assault with a deadly weapon". What would giving those two crimes synonymous names accomplish?
>I feel like it's a mistake for the legal code to distinguish between what are fully interchangeable terms in the language the code is supposedly written in.
They're not at all fully interchangeable, just many Americans have a poor grasp of the English language.
I have a friend who came out of his house to shoot and kill a guy who was inside his car attempting to steal it. Friend was literally a local celebrity for months.
In this case Texas defines "criminal mischief" in three clauses, and separately defines circumstances under which it constitutes a felony. Felony mischief is largely but not exclusively defined by the amount of pecuniary loss.
The first two clauses are destroying property and damaging property in a way that causes pecuniary loss to anyone.
The third clause is making marks on property. This seems like it would always be included under "damaging property in a way that causes pecuniary loss", so I would guess it's there to make it completely explicit that graffiti counts as criminal mischief.
The quoted section of the penal code does not appear to apply any restrictions to the specific variety of criminal mischief that justifies deadly force (other than that it occurs at night).
For something like graffiti where the general sentiment is that deadly force shouldn't be considered justified, I could see an argument that the use of deadly force violates §9.42(3)(A), which requires the person using deadly force to reasonably believe that the land or property in question "cannot be protected or recovered by any other means". If we view both verbs as applying to criminal mischief, you could make the argument that when you catch someone spraying graffiti on a wall on your property, your property can be recovered, though not protected, by e.g. repainting the wall.
The counterargument might be that "recovered" is in there as the appropriate verb for cases of theft, and "protected" is in there for cases of mischief.
I don't think restricting §9.42 to felony mischief would be an improvement to the law; it's difficult to know whether criminal mischief is or isn't a felony until you've tried to recover from it and learned how much that will cost. If you catch someone keying your car, for example, that probably is a felony, but as far as social impact I would rate it similarly to graffiti.
The alternative would be completely incoherent. If it's OK to prevent theft, the appropriation of property, it must also be OK to prevent criminal mischief, which is the destruction of property.
Note that the harm to the victim is identical in both cases, except that in the case of theft, recovery may be possible.
That’s not a useful definition in a democracy. Who gets to define what’s justified if not the duly elected legislature? I bet if you put the current Texas law on the ballot today you’d get the same answer.
My comment may sound cliché, but I genuinely believe this, no material possession is worth more than a human life. A catalytic converter can be replaced, a life cannot.
> A catalytic converter can be replaced, a life cannot.
So don't go around stealing catalytic converters. Same deal with states with "stand your ground laws". It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.
And on the "replacing" part- on whose dime? What if someone's only means of transportation is affected, and they lose wages or outright lose their job? Are you going to pay for it? Of course not.
No, a better reason to not allow shooting of common thieves is that you don't want ordinary people shooting randomly at each other. The government / police should be able to handle this, but they either don't care or are incompetent.
Which leaves the ordinary upstanding citizen stuck between a rock and a hard place. The Man extracts taxes from their earnings, and thieves who ruin lives get a slap on the wrist because "lives are oh precious".
It's good to be able to stand your ground if that becomes necessary, I think. When I took concealed carry classes, they taught me to aim towards the center of mass to maximize my chances of a hit that would disable the attacker and to keep shooting until they stop being a threat.
But I also think that it is often more-useful and much, much safer to know how to de-escalate when that's possible. When I took martial arts classes, they taught me that the first step towards winning a fight was to avoid fighting to begin with, and always calm things down one notch at a time. If, and only if, that becomes impossible, then: Kick the snot out of them until they stop being a threat.
And running away can be useful: An attacker's ability to do harm decreases with distance. When I took army basic training, we trained a lot on running. They taught me that being able to run reasonably-quickly for reasonably-long distances was a skill that most people lack. Just keep running and the attacker will probably get tired and give up long before you do, which generally resolves the threat. If the threat persists after running away, then: Use the element of surprise and just turn around and stab them until they stop being a threat.
---
This is not an exhaustive list of methods and it is possible for any of them to go wrong. It's also possible to do nothing at all as a response and still have a very bad time of things.
It's a complex world. We've got billions of other people with different backgrounds, different problems, and different ideas of how they're going to get a little further ahead today than they were yesterday.
If we all had all of the answers, then we wouldn't have the kinds of desperation that leads to these problems to begin with.
I was referring to homes. This situation likely could've been avoided by not engaging in recklessly stupid behavior like road rage and escalating the situation (with one's family present, to boot).
Also, a news article of some random altercation doesn't change anything about what I said: It's simply impossible to be shot (or clubbed, or beaten up, or whatever) by someone in their home for invading, if you never invade people's homes in the first place. So don't do that. And don't steal catalytic converters either.
> It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.
The clear, plain-English implication of what you're suggesting is: your risk of getting shot (in the US) is, to a large extent, directly correlated to your invasion of other people's homes.
Except that there's no evidence to support this. According to FBI data from 2015-2019, the ratio of criminal gun homicides to justifiable homicides (as in self-defense) was 34:1.
Over 10,000 innocent people are killed by guns every year in the US, including more than 1,000 young people. This excludes suicides, which itself is a number that you'd probably be wise to pay attention to.
Yeah. There were times in my life I would have put my life on the line (and that of the thief) to defend my vehicle and the tools within it. Those fed myself and my family. I would have had no reasonable means to replace my tools, and barely reasonable means to replace the damage a catalytic converter theft would have caused me.
Today it's trivially easy for me to say "property can be replaced, a life cannot" since I am exceedingly privileged. I would not put my life, or anyone else's on the line to defend anything but my and my family's personal safety. But I remember what it was like to not be so ridiculously privileged. So I get it.
Only someone who has never lived a hard day in their life can spew such stuff at other folks. It's entirely circumstantial.
The laws should reflect the prior case, not the privileged one. At least if you want to disincentivize criminal behavior.
Or you could have a society with a welfare safety net or even viable forms of transportation other than a private car. It appears that places where that happen also tend to have much lower crime rates as an added benefit.
Nobody is forcing people to risk their lives to infringe on other people's rights. Whenever I see a news article about a criminal killed in the act, I never think "I wish they were alive.", I think "I wish they never went down that path in the first place that lead to that scenario."
I was once beaten senseless by a group of 3 young men when I decided to take an early-morning walk to get some smokes from the store down the way, in a sleepy small city in Ohio.
There was nothing that I was doing that was wrong in any way. I was quietly minding my own business when they came up from behind me with other ideas and one of them hit me in the side of my face, from behind, with an intensity that I'd never really experienced before in all of my years.
I lost hours of my memory and years of my mental health. I gained years of occasional intense neck pain that consistently put my mind in very dark places, and thousands of dollars of medical bills.
They gained two unopened packs of Camels and the pocket knife that I apparently failed to effectively utilize. I still had my wallet and my phone.
The police did nothing of any productive impact. A report was taken, and it was taken poorly. When 3 guys were arrested a couple of weeks later for robbing someone with a baseball bat and I recognized their pictures, they didn't care. I walked the local law-enforcement ladder all the way up to the city prosecutor, and also through parallels in the sheriff's department.
Nothing was productively done on my behalf.
It made me feel so angry and powerless. A follow-up that I requested came along with the cop that took the first report, and resulted in such profound and obtuse stonewalling that I became tremendously and irreverently furious. I left the room, while demanding from the other side of a wall that he get the fuck out of my apartment.
This all conspired to make it clear that it was my cross to bear. Nobody of any influence was going to help me along the way.
(I'd probably have a very different story to tell if I'd shot the attackers all dead, but I don't have that story. I was not equipped to do that so there is no direct comparison here for me to make. It is definitely my hope that I never have any opportunities to make such a comparison.)
In your other comment you state that you've taken 3 different types of combat training (concealed carry, martial arts, army basic). I am curious if you did all this training after the incident with the 3 young men or before?
It's not just $2k lost here. There's a lot to be said about the immeasurable value of a high-trust society.
As another commenter said: It's incredibly easy to not get shot; don't burglarize someone's home the same way you wouldn't jump in front of a moving train.
Holding the threat of death over people isn't the way to a "high-trust society." Maybe you think it's the way to something similar, but you have to give up the word "trust" because it doesn't apply here. If the only reason I think a man isn't going to rob me is because I will shoot him if he does, I don't trust that man.
A society which only has low crime because everyone is able to use lethal force to defend themselves and their property isn't one I would call higher "trust" than one that maintains the same crime levels without that threat.
It's almost never $2k and then they go to live a normal life.
You don't shoot them there they steal yet again and maybe harm someone in the process.
I was a victim a theft a few times and violent assault 2 times. Although I managed to escape both times and could afford to replace my property I wish someone else shot them or I had a chance to do it - as a favor to future victims.
Ah, but that’s not the choice. The choice is whether there exist probability p, life L, and material possession m such that the possession is worth more than p times L.
The conclusion that there is no such triad seems clearly absurd since we allow people to build things for us the construction of which offers them a non-zero chance of death.
It is reasonable to say that a precise frontier is not describable because of Sorites but to say no triad exists implies that you only participate in an economy consisting exclusively of zero risk behaviour[0] That seems improbable.
Once we’ve dealt with that, perhaps we may be able to conclude that catalytic converters exist on one side of the frontier or on the other side or perhaps we might say that they lie along the Sorites boundary.
0: we are not unreasonable. We might even choose to consider imperfect information about the risk, the risk being at a Pareto optimum, the risk being at optimum against counterfactual, etc.
A great example of this triad is driving a car: many people choose to do so every day and a small but not insignificant fraction of them will die because of it.
It's easy to say that. Not so easy to take responsibility for those views and compensate the victim which is often forced to work several months to cover the damage, may lose their job or their life is otherwise negatively affected.
"Let's not harm the thief but force the victim to cover the damages" is what it comes down to and imo it's a very immoral stance.
This sounds great in theory, and I used to agree, but:
a. There's no guarantee against escalation, a property crime turns into a violent crime very easily.
b. Property crime can have a deep psychological impact on the victim - something the perpetrator demonstrably gives zero fucks about.
c. The police and justice system in 2026 don't care about prosecuting property crime. Having no recourse at all if you're being robbed (a common situation when defending your own property is effectively illegal because of the risk to the perpetrator) is grossly unfair.
this is so untrue, gullible and naive. so if I steal your home, your car, your food, your water, and everything material, and you end up starving and dead or stranded on the side of a ride in a desert where no ones coming to help you - are you are saying that is ok since that stuff can be replaced?
You absolutely can cause death to a human and take a human life through material theft.
Burglars in particular tend to target empty houses precisely to avoid confrontation. To bring a weapon only make sense if there is a chance of getting shot at.
Isn't "crime, done with the involvement of a firearm" also often more harshly punished than the plain crime itself? If a burglar is targeting empty houses, this would give them a strong incentive to not bring a firearm, just in case they get caught.
They frequently already are. Even here in Canada[1] where any kind of "carry" is generally not allowed. Shockingly, thieves often don't care about gun laws though.
I think that world largely exists. There are some counties in Texas where crime is essentially negligible.
I live a few minutes away from one of the facilities where capital punishment is administered. The local community is extremely pleasant. I don't bother locking my doors at home or at the grocery store. The only place any real crime occurs is within a few hundred yards of the interstate. Target and Home Depot get robbed occasionally, but that's about it around here. I don't think it's physically possible to steal from my local Home Depot without ending up in the flock database. The geometry and overlapping coverage they have is pretty crazy now. You can tell they waged a full scale war against an army of meth addicts and won decisively. Every time I go into that store looking for a Milwaukee product, I find it in stock and unmolested.
At no point do I worry about a western style shootout with a bandit. The most prolific criminal around here has 4 legs and only really cares for the contents of particular trash cans and gardens.
Texas has among the highest crime rates in the country, 17th for violent crime, even worse for property crime. Given the wealth of Texas, having such high crime rates is even more embarrassing (crime and poverty go hand in hand, but Texas doesn't have that excuse). In short, you're talking out of your ass.
What an insane trade off. Seems like a few bait cars and a couple of trackers would be plenty to figure out where the converters are getting fenced. Obviously there is a small number of buyers driving the entire catalytic theft economy.
EV batteries weigh hundreds of kilos. They typically require a mechanical workshop with a hoist to remove, not something your typical theif could easily steal on a street corner.
Carpenter v. United States and the supporting opinion written by John Roberts in 2018 reaffirms that ongoing electronic surveillance requires a search warrant and constitutes a violation of the 4th amendment.
I don't live in the US, but it seems that constant monitoring via government sanctioned facial recognition technology falls under that umbrella.
Good thing that there isn't a court in the United States that exists solely to make those kinds of distinctions and revise previous interpretations of the law in order to apply them to an evolving legal landscape.
Flock cameras using facial recognition to surveil citizens in public spaces without a warrant is a 4th amendment violation under any rational reading, and it is up to the American people whether they want to live in country that no longer holds itself accountable to the law or not.
It really has no impact on my life beyond the looming existential crisis of the world's largest military and nuclear power slowly becoming a rogue fascist state.
I've yet to hear a convincing connection between driving down a public road and having privacy - in fact, the outside of a registered motor vehicle on a public road is about as non-private as you can expect.
You already have a unique plate tied to the registered owner of the car, and a range of court cases have held you can be stopped, ordered out of the car, questioned (by both police and immigration enforcement), etc.
It's not about your vehicle being seen in public at a single point in time, it's the fact that this system captures everyone's patterns of life. School, doctor, shooting range, church, play, protest. When, when, how often. All tracked and packaged up in a commercial database, without warrant or justification.
If you happened upon me on a public street, I'd say "that I'm here on this street now is not private information".
If you installed sensors across the entire city with 2-5 block resolution and could tell me everywhere I have been in the last 30 days (and hence where I'm liable to be tomorrow), I'd say "you are grossly violating my right to be secure in my person against unreasonable search - this is wrong".
"Right to privacy" isn't a specific right in the US. Furthermore, being in the middle of a public roadway in a registered vehicle shouldn't confer the expectation of privacy, per Katz. Probably the closest case law is Carpenter, which only covers cell data and was specifically meant to apply narrowly to that type of info.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" in case you forgot.
I'm not saying you have to reply in a technical term - just explain how being seen and recorded driving down a public street, in a vehicle that's required to display an identifiable plate you've registered with the government, constitutes a search, seizure, or even an invasion of your privacy.
Nobody's saying you have to install a camera outside your house (ignoring the dozens of cameras your neighbors have willingly installed to replace their doorbell or to deter theft/burglary). But you can't argue that the government or private businesses can't deploy cameras because you expect privacy in the middle of a road.
To have a high trust society you need to know who you are dealing with. That's why we don't cover our faces when interacting with others or walking around.
Same with driving. If anything there is too much privacy - we should know who drives irresponsibly, is a danger etc.
Privacy is about being in your home away from others, correspondence etc. Once you are interacting with others it's not a feature.
Useless because everyone around you genuinely thinks differently from you? Or useless because said 70+ yo retired asset owners with more means to vote without more than the working class?
Big difference in issue. You can't gerrymander a local bill so those kinds of votes are arguably more important than nationals. And you'd be surprised how big a difference a visit with a few dozen of your peers can make to a townhall meeting. That's something we seem to forget until our backs are truly to a wall.
Given how unpopular these cameras are, and how sloppy their security has been, I have come to assume there's boatloads of bribery happening. I can't come up with any other explanation for how willing police chiefs and city councilors and mayors are to get yelled at at city council meetings and how wantonly they're giving away the privacy of their constituents.
I'm guessing that as scrutiny increases, we'll begin to hear about questionable, at best, sales tactics, if not outright bribery. Trips, sponsored speaking/training engagements that puts money in the pockets of cops and policymakers, etc. The whole thing stinks of it.
It’s been proven (at least in the Minnesota flock conference) that flock pays politicians and police as private contractors and commissions them on any potential contracts they bring to flock
Strange that someone else’s question “Did it reduce catalytic converter theft?”, directly relevant to the article, got downvoted to death. Not sure if we’re meant to have discussions here or just dutifully complain about topics that are fashionable to complain about.
I agree. I "revived" the comment by clicking on the timestamp ("33 minutes ago") and then clicking "vouch". I believe only users with a score of 200+ (points? karma?) can do so.
“[dead]” usually means algorithmic (could be as simple as an account registered via Tor that hasn’t been vouched for enough times). “[flagged][dead]” usually means it was flag-killed by users, except I’ve been noticing some AI written comments that are flagged instead of just dead, but they’re minutes old so unlikely to be user flagged.
There's been an "AI comment detect" algo trialed and running for a month or so now.
If you see any probably human comments tagged as Mr Roboto either vouch (weak indication, needs a few others to boost) or email hn@<this site> for dang / tom to cast a meat based eyeball over it.
I wondered that too. It doesn't say, but does state: "Data from the license plate readers, known in law enforcement as LPRs, was searched 62,000 times in 2025, leading to about 1,660 cleared catalytic converter theft cases, a report from the authority said."
Also, how many missing people are there? finding 10k seems quite a lot. “one of the most effective ways Flock has been able to help find, just last year, over 10,000 missing persons”.
The term "missing person" calls to mind someone who is in serious danger, but a majority are something minor, like someone quitting a job without notice or taking an unannounced trip. The vast majority are resolved by finding the person alive.
Flock helping close 10K cases doesn't surprise me at all, but it doesn't meant those people wouldn't have been found without it. It may mean less work for the police, but the police don't usually put a lot of effort into a missing person without evidence they're in danger.
So to fight abuse and overreach by your leaders, you can:
- give up your car/vehicle propery
- let an LLC take ownership
- reside in the privacy protections of LLC and corporation
I don't think any successful case has happened yet where flock et al have pierced the corporate veil to get address information, nor dug into insurance records to find who the LLC-license plates belong to.
i don’t think that will help anything. surely flock and similar companies use facial recognition features? particularly at every stores parking lot that has these in it?
and i’d be more shocked if the same stores weren’t already sharing their own inside cameras facial recognition directly with companies like flock already.
and from what we’ve seen, these companies cameras are linked up with names from frequent shopper cards, cc data, what people buy, when they buy it, etc…
I doubt it helped much directly. The nationwide ring that was dismantled recently was busted partially due to surveillance from a pole mounted camera though. The article title initially baited my rage, but I can plausibly see how LPRC's could be used to track catalytic converter thieves.
Jeez, in not normally cynical but the Japanese buyer faced no charges and this has bad optics:
> Janice Ayala joined Dowa Metals & Mining America as their Chief Compliance Officer on March 3, 2023. During Ayala's 27-year tenure at the Department of Homeland Security, her most recent role before joining Dowa was as Director of Joint Task Force – Investigations. This agency oversaw the investigation into both DG Auto Parts and Dowa.
Number of LPR Deployments by taskforce investigators 42,878
Number of vehicles recovered from LPR detection 1,963
Number of Cleared Cases – Catalytic Converter Theft 1,658
Number of arrests from LPR detection 569
Number of identified/documented prolific catalytic converter theft offenders 266
Number of Catalytic Converter Theft bait operations 236
The problem is they don't define "deployments". There are ~13,500 ALPR cameras and they do thousands of plates per hour and neither of those numbers matches the deployment. My best guess is it is a targeted search and so a vehicle is recovered or a case is cleared 2-3 times out of every 100 times they search the database.
Regarding actual reduction, as another comment said, the amount of crime fluctuates with metal prices, pretty much lockstep. But at least they can lock the people away.
It’s hard to say. As the economic got better, trade policies stabilized and the price of commodities and therefore the metals in a converter dropped in value. As the price of the metals went down, the thefts dropped nationally. Texas thefts seemed to have dropped inline with the national trend. Since the supply side issues are picking up again, the thefts are going up likewise.
Doesn't seem especially likely, does it? People report the thefts in unmonitored neighborhoods. The police... check the nearby intersection cameras for any vehicles passing between 11pm and 4am?
As much as I think the tech needs to be regulated to prevent abuse, if I was a driver in San Francisco I’d try to only ever park my car directly in view of a flock camera.
Texas
> In 2023, the Texas Legislature unanimously passed a law raising auto insurance costs for Texans by $1 to combat rampant catalytic converter theft.
> The Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority, led by a board mostly appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, has turned the $1 fee hike into at least 3,200 Flock cameras.
More coming. Meanwhile, secure your EV!!! Batteries will be next!!!
In Texas I'm surprised it's not legal to shoot a catalytic converter thief if caught in the act. That's what they used to do for cattle rustlers.
https://guides.sll.texas.gov/gun-laws/stand-your-ground
links to https://www.uslawshield.com/defend-property-texas/
> Texas law allows you to use deadly force to protect property if you would be justified in using force, and you reasonably believe it is immediately necessary to prevent the imminent commission of specific enumerated property crimes. These are arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, theft during the nighttime, or criminal mischief during the nighttime.
I'd think that'd qualify.
https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/?tab=1&code=PE&chapter=PE...
> Sec. 9.42. DEADLY FORCE TO PROTECT PROPERTY. A person is justified in using deadly force against another to protect land or tangible, movable property:
> (1) if he would be justified in using force against the other under Section 9.41; and
> (2) when and to the degree he reasonably believes the deadly force is immediately necessary:
> (A) to prevent the other's imminent commission of arson, burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, theft during the nighttime, or criminal mischief during the nighttime; or (B) to prevent the other who is fleeing immediately after committing burglary, robbery, aggravated robbery, or theft during the nighttime from escaping with the property; and
> (3) he reasonably believes that:
> (A) the land or property cannot be protected or recovered by any other means; or (B) the use of force other than deadly force to protect or recover the land or property would expose the actor or another to a substantial risk of death or serious bodily injury.
Deadly force can be lawful in Germany as well, reading Texas law I wonder which nuances of the laws make the biggest difference (assuming there's one).
Could also be that the difference comes from owning land works differently in Germany (because it's much more densely populated) and of course owning anything except small guns is completely forbidden.
people freqently conflate Stand Your Ground vs Duty to Retreat... with the entire rest of the debate.
I'm trying to keep this neutral, so I'm using a rather cut and dry example: Somebody kicks in your door with a pump action and starts shooting- There are _some_ jurisdictions that require you to try and flee. You kill them and they werent bodily blocking your car in? Murder charge. investigation finds a sabatoged engine? Doesn't matter.
Stand Your Ground assumes reasonableness and codifies leaveing the fight or flee decision up to the individual.
Ultimately- you're going to have PTSD either way.
> Somebody kicks in your door with a pump action and starts shooting- There are _some_ jurisdictions that require you to try and flee. You kill them and they werent bodily blocking your car in? Murder charge.
Which jurisdictions? Is this in the US? I’ve lived in a bunch of European countries and in none would you be charged with murder in that situation.
Germany has had some weird court decisions in that regard, in general the law does say flee and not shoot back if this is an option. But mostly courts are reasonable and do not punish the victim. Only if the victim decides to use violence after the threat is over
https://www.hrr-strafrecht.de/3/15/3-199-15.php
But there was even a case, where a hells angel shot a police officer in his home who were doing a raid - and got free (because they did not identify themself as police).
https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/bgh-spricht-hells-a...
The law says your are allowed to stand your ground. You don't have to flee.
> But there was even a case,
I don't know the details of the case, but if somebody thought some criminals are raiding his house with guns and it's reasonable the he thought that, then he's fully within his rights to defend himself and, depending on the necessities, by shooting at them.
Still terrible what happened, of course.
"The law says your are allowed to stand your ground. You don't have to flee."
No it does not in germany (and I think most other states of the world).
If fleeing is a safe option - this is what you have to do instead of shooting. Reality just seldom is so clear.
> European countries and in none would you be charged with murder in that situation.
Local news say otherwise
Because local news love to omit certain details of a case or don't know them to begin with.
They make money reporting what people want to read and that's not necessary what's true.
It's a BS
If someone comes through your home door guns akimbo in the US, blasting back is fine
US Supreme court has often leaned heavily on right to protect self in one's own home in ruling against local and state laws that might ban ridiculous things.
Your example isn't quite as cut-and-dry because in a lot of cases that's going to involve the Castle Doctrine as well, and "starts shooting" means there is an actual danger merely than a perceived potential danger.
Counter-example: You're walking on the streets, at night, in the "bad part" of town. Someone walks towards you with their hands in their pockets, and their head covered with a hoodie. They say "Hey, what are you doing here?". You perceive this to be a threatening situation and fear for your life. Are you supposed to: a) pull out your gun and shoot them, or b) run away?
Some proponents of Stand Your Ground would say that option A is perfectly fine, some proponents of Duty To Retreat would say that you must attempt option B first, and fall back to option A only as a last resort.
First off- Texas has an explicit law making copper and catalytic converter theft a "Jail felony"- but if you break any other laws on the way, it's upgraded to a class 3 felony. See: https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/?tab=1&code=PE&chapter=PE... And. if you really want to play cops and robbers, a personally witnessed jail felony seems to be enough for a citzen's arrest.
Second: "(B) the use of force other than deadly force to protect or recover the land or property would expose the actor or another to a substantial risk of death or serious bodily injury." - YOU HAVE TO BE AFRAID FOR YOUR LIFE Texas gives citizens enourmous latitude in these matters, but it's not carte blanche for murder.
Afraid for your life if you were to confront the thief.
That reasonably covers pretty much all cases, especially in a state where lots of people have guns.
In other words: don't be an idiot and call the cops instead. That's what they are supposed to be for!
I can’t see a catalytic converter theft on a car parked on the street as burglary. Parked in a (private) garage? Yes, burglary. Parked on the street? No.
So, daytime theft of a converter from a car parked outside wouldn’t qualify I don’t think.
It also mentions:
> theft during the nighttime, or criminal mischief during the nighttime.
Seems like that qualifies
I think this even covers graffiti during the nighttime.
Parked in your driveway
No, the driveway wouldn't count. Texas doesn't define burglary by property boundaries; you have to enter a "building" or a "habitation", and a habitation must be a "structure" or a "vehicle".
Are you sure that doesn't qualify on the basis that it is the curtilage of your home? Often this counts as "in your dwelling" because it's in your private space that immediately accompanies the dwelling.
> Often this counts as "in your dwelling"
Is this true in any context other than a potential fourth amendment violation by an agent of the state?
If you sleep in the car it will qualify no matter where you're parked. This also appears to be true of an RV or any vehicle that clearly accommodates sleeping.
For reference:
"Burglary" under the Texas penal code is defined by entering a habitation or any portion of a building that is not open to the public, either with the intent to commit a crime, or when followed by the actual commission of, or the attempt to commit, a crime.
"Robbery" is theft in which the thief causes an injury to someone else. (Or intentionally threatens to do so.)
"Theft" is what it sounds like.
Most notably burglary need not include any element of theft. I feel like it's a mistake for the legal code to distinguish between what are fully interchangeable terms in the language the code is supposedly written in.
On topic for this particular comment, "habitation" is specifically defined to include vehicles "adapted for the overnight accommodation of persons".
> I feel like it's a mistake for the legal code to distinguish between what are fully interchangeable terms in the language the code is supposedly written in.
I’ve thought about this too. They often vary from state to state as well. But the alternative would be to create new legal terms, which would be more confusing, or use just use numbers, which would be hard for laypeople to discuss.
> But the alternative would be to create new legal terms, which would be more confusing, or use just use numbers, which would be hard for laypeople to discuss.
Well, compare homicide, which in popular culture is divided into "murder in the first degree", "murder in the second degree", and "murder in the third degree" alternately known as "manslaughter".
It's not clear to me whether you consider those "new legal terms" or "just using numbers", since in my eyes they are terms invented for the purpose of the law, distinguished from each other by numbers.
But they appear to be superior to the division between "burglary", "robbery", and "theft" either way. They have no preexisting meaning (unlike "burglary" and "robbery", which are used in spite of existing contradictory meaning) and they cause no difficulties in discussing the crimes, which we can be certain of because these terms already exist and people discuss them all the time.
In the Texas penal code, homicide is actually divided into "murder", "capital murder", "manslaughter", and "criminally negligent homicide".
These are clearly "new terms" rather than "numbers". They seem pretty straightforward: "murder" is defined in harmony with its natural English-language meaning. "Capital murder" is a variety of murder that allows for capital punishment. "Manslaughter" is homicide caused recklessly rather than intentionally, and is in harmony with the popular understanding of the word "manslaughter". And "criminally negligent homicide" is homicide caused negligently rather than intentionally, and that's also in harmony with the normal construction of noun phrases in English.
If we were instead to give those four categories names that nobody without special training was even capable of distinguishing from one another -- as Texas has already done for "burglary", "robbery", and "theft" -- what would improve? I submit that that would make some things worse while making nothing better.
Compare also the popular-culture division between "assault" and "assault with a deadly weapon". What would giving those two crimes synonymous names accomplish?
> Private Domicile, BITCH
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEdaQcq4w88
>I feel like it's a mistake for the legal code to distinguish between what are fully interchangeable terms in the language the code is supposedly written in.
They're not at all fully interchangeable, just many Americans have a poor grasp of the English language.
The language is solely defined by what people think it means. The terms are in fact fully interchangeable.
If you'd like it packaged in something that looks authoritative, you might consider the following definitions from Merriam-Webster:
burgle: to commit robbery
rob: to take away as loot : steal
thieve: steal, rob
I have a friend who came out of his house to shoot and kill a guy who was inside his car attempting to steal it. Friend was literally a local celebrity for months.
So what happened? Was there a legal judgment? Did he get legal advice? Did local newspapers commission and publish legal analyses?
(Did this happen in Texas?)
What's the point of Texas, then? Maybe Florida?
You can legally murder people to prevent "mischief", as long as it's at night? Wow.
IANAL.
Mischief is typically a serious crime; the legal and common uses of the word are different and confusing.
But I don't think Texas is restricting this to the more serious felony mischief here.
In this case Texas defines "criminal mischief" in three clauses, and separately defines circumstances under which it constitutes a felony. Felony mischief is largely but not exclusively defined by the amount of pecuniary loss.
The first two clauses are destroying property and damaging property in a way that causes pecuniary loss to anyone.
The third clause is making marks on property. This seems like it would always be included under "damaging property in a way that causes pecuniary loss", so I would guess it's there to make it completely explicit that graffiti counts as criminal mischief.
The quoted section of the penal code does not appear to apply any restrictions to the specific variety of criminal mischief that justifies deadly force (other than that it occurs at night).
For something like graffiti where the general sentiment is that deadly force shouldn't be considered justified, I could see an argument that the use of deadly force violates §9.42(3)(A), which requires the person using deadly force to reasonably believe that the land or property in question "cannot be protected or recovered by any other means". If we view both verbs as applying to criminal mischief, you could make the argument that when you catch someone spraying graffiti on a wall on your property, your property can be recovered, though not protected, by e.g. repainting the wall.
The counterargument might be that "recovered" is in there as the appropriate verb for cases of theft, and "protected" is in there for cases of mischief.
I don't think restricting §9.42 to felony mischief would be an improvement to the law; it's difficult to know whether criminal mischief is or isn't a felony until you've tried to recover from it and learned how much that will cost. If you catch someone keying your car, for example, that probably is a felony, but as far as social impact I would rate it similarly to graffiti.
It ain't murder. (other words apply)
The alternative would be completely incoherent. If it's OK to prevent theft, the appropriation of property, it must also be OK to prevent criminal mischief, which is the destruction of property.
Note that the harm to the victim is identical in both cases, except that in the case of theft, recovery may be possible.
“Legal” murder makes absolutely no sense. If its legal its not murder. You mean “legally kill”
It can also mean unjustified/immoral killing, which can be a useful definition (otherwise e.g. a true dictator can never murder anyone).
That’s not a useful definition in a democracy. Who gets to define what’s justified if not the duly elected legislature? I bet if you put the current Texas law on the ballot today you’d get the same answer.
It is a useful definition, because it allows you to talk about places where the law might be unjust.
You can't have a functioning democracy if it's impossible to criticise the current setup. This is the whole idea behind newspeak [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
If you put that on the ballot in other states this would be more popular than initially thought by most.
Yeah.
You expect pigs to defend you?
My comment may sound cliché, but I genuinely believe this, no material possession is worth more than a human life. A catalytic converter can be replaced, a life cannot.
> A catalytic converter can be replaced, a life cannot.
So don't go around stealing catalytic converters. Same deal with states with "stand your ground laws". It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.
And on the "replacing" part- on whose dime? What if someone's only means of transportation is affected, and they lose wages or outright lose their job? Are you going to pay for it? Of course not.
No, a better reason to not allow shooting of common thieves is that you don't want ordinary people shooting randomly at each other. The government / police should be able to handle this, but they either don't care or are incompetent.
Which leaves the ordinary upstanding citizen stuck between a rock and a hard place. The Man extracts taxes from their earnings, and thieves who ruin lives get a slap on the wrist because "lives are oh precious".
I agree with much more in your comment than I don't, but
> It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.
Is pat to the point of naiveté.
People get shot turning into the wrong driveway[1], or knocking on the wrong door[2]. If anything, it's astonishingly easy to get shot in the US of A.
But, you probably meant something like that when you said
> you don't want ordinary people shooting randomly at each other. The government / police should be able to handle this [but don't.
And I agree with that on both points.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kaylin_Gillis [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Ralph_Yarl
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/florida-road-rage-incident-...
It's good to be able to stand your ground if that becomes necessary, I think. When I took concealed carry classes, they taught me to aim towards the center of mass to maximize my chances of a hit that would disable the attacker and to keep shooting until they stop being a threat.
But I also think that it is often more-useful and much, much safer to know how to de-escalate when that's possible. When I took martial arts classes, they taught me that the first step towards winning a fight was to avoid fighting to begin with, and always calm things down one notch at a time. If, and only if, that becomes impossible, then: Kick the snot out of them until they stop being a threat.
And running away can be useful: An attacker's ability to do harm decreases with distance. When I took army basic training, we trained a lot on running. They taught me that being able to run reasonably-quickly for reasonably-long distances was a skill that most people lack. Just keep running and the attacker will probably get tired and give up long before you do, which generally resolves the threat. If the threat persists after running away, then: Use the element of surprise and just turn around and stab them until they stop being a threat.
---
This is not an exhaustive list of methods and it is possible for any of them to go wrong. It's also possible to do nothing at all as a response and still have a very bad time of things.
It's a complex world. We've got billions of other people with different backgrounds, different problems, and different ideas of how they're going to get a little further ahead today than they were yesterday.
If we all had all of the answers, then we wouldn't have the kinds of desperation that leads to these problems to begin with.
But we don't all have all of the answers.
Come on, these maniacs would have used knives or clubs in any case. Or you one of these "the blade itself" guys?
I was referring to homes. This situation likely could've been avoided by not engaging in recklessly stupid behavior like road rage and escalating the situation (with one's family present, to boot).
Also, a news article of some random altercation doesn't change anything about what I said: It's simply impossible to be shot (or clubbed, or beaten up, or whatever) by someone in their home for invading, if you never invade people's homes in the first place. So don't do that. And don't steal catalytic converters either.
In your original comment, you stated:
> It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.
The clear, plain-English implication of what you're suggesting is: your risk of getting shot (in the US) is, to a large extent, directly correlated to your invasion of other people's homes.
Except that there's no evidence to support this. According to FBI data from 2015-2019, the ratio of criminal gun homicides to justifiable homicides (as in self-defense) was 34:1.
Over 10,000 innocent people are killed by guns every year in the US, including more than 1,000 young people. This excludes suicides, which itself is a number that you'd probably be wise to pay attention to.
Social welfare and affordable insurance will solve more than owning guns and killing each other over property.
All lives are not equal. The value of the life of a thief whose only impact on the society is negative, cannot be compared to e.g. a doctor.
I agree with the general concept, but it's not practical to use.
What about a bad medic? Or a thief that helps homeless people in their free time?
If it was easy, we would have simpler laws and better justice systems...
Do you also define yourself according to the worst thing you've ever done?
So why would someone risk his live and become a thief instead of a doctor?
Some combination of desperation and sociopathy.
I might suppose that it's usually more the former than the latter, but there's degrees to each characteristic.
They perceive that they need things, and they don't necessarily care who they harm to get the things that satisfy this need.
(When we dress it up all nice and back it with corporate layers and an army of lawyers, sometimes we get CEOs.)
Yeah. There were times in my life I would have put my life on the line (and that of the thief) to defend my vehicle and the tools within it. Those fed myself and my family. I would have had no reasonable means to replace my tools, and barely reasonable means to replace the damage a catalytic converter theft would have caused me.
Today it's trivially easy for me to say "property can be replaced, a life cannot" since I am exceedingly privileged. I would not put my life, or anyone else's on the line to defend anything but my and my family's personal safety. But I remember what it was like to not be so ridiculously privileged. So I get it.
Only someone who has never lived a hard day in their life can spew such stuff at other folks. It's entirely circumstantial.
The laws should reflect the prior case, not the privileged one. At least if you want to disincentivize criminal behavior.
Or you could have a society with a welfare safety net or even viable forms of transportation other than a private car. It appears that places where that happen also tend to have much lower crime rates as an added benefit.
government / police should be able to handle this
There's a classic saying: "When seconds count, the police are minutes away."
...and going back to the original topic, even the Flock cameras aren't going to stop criminals, if that's what you're implying.
Nobody is forcing people to risk their lives to infringe on other people's rights. Whenever I see a news article about a criminal killed in the act, I never think "I wish they were alive.", I think "I wish they never went down that path in the first place that lead to that scenario."
> Nobody is forcing people to risk their lives to infringe on other people's rights.
Except poverty, ignorance, hunger, addiction, untreated mental illness...
If I kill you over a $2K catalytic converter, my sanity is gone.
I could never sleep at night without thinking about what I have done.'
A life is worth a lot more than $2k for my sanity.
I was once beaten senseless by a group of 3 young men when I decided to take an early-morning walk to get some smokes from the store down the way, in a sleepy small city in Ohio.
There was nothing that I was doing that was wrong in any way. I was quietly minding my own business when they came up from behind me with other ideas and one of them hit me in the side of my face, from behind, with an intensity that I'd never really experienced before in all of my years.
I lost hours of my memory and years of my mental health. I gained years of occasional intense neck pain that consistently put my mind in very dark places, and thousands of dollars of medical bills.
They gained two unopened packs of Camels and the pocket knife that I apparently failed to effectively utilize. I still had my wallet and my phone.
The police did nothing of any productive impact. A report was taken, and it was taken poorly. When 3 guys were arrested a couple of weeks later for robbing someone with a baseball bat and I recognized their pictures, they didn't care. I walked the local law-enforcement ladder all the way up to the city prosecutor, and also through parallels in the sheriff's department.
Nothing was productively done on my behalf.
It made me feel so angry and powerless. A follow-up that I requested came along with the cop that took the first report, and resulted in such profound and obtuse stonewalling that I became tremendously and irreverently furious. I left the room, while demanding from the other side of a wall that he get the fuck out of my apartment.
This all conspired to make it clear that it was my cross to bear. Nobody of any influence was going to help me along the way.
(I'd probably have a very different story to tell if I'd shot the attackers all dead, but I don't have that story. I was not equipped to do that so there is no direct comparison here for me to make. It is definitely my hope that I never have any opportunities to make such a comparison.)
In your other comment you state that you've taken 3 different types of combat training (concealed carry, martial arts, army basic). I am curious if you did all this training after the incident with the 3 young men or before?
Interesting dichotomy. I think a lot of people would have no problem.
I think I would consider myself in that group.
I think some lives are worth negative, and everyone is better off with them dead.
It's not just $2k lost here. There's a lot to be said about the immeasurable value of a high-trust society.
As another commenter said: It's incredibly easy to not get shot; don't burglarize someone's home the same way you wouldn't jump in front of a moving train.
Holding the threat of death over people isn't the way to a "high-trust society." Maybe you think it's the way to something similar, but you have to give up the word "trust" because it doesn't apply here. If the only reason I think a man isn't going to rob me is because I will shoot him if he does, I don't trust that man.
A society which only has low crime because everyone is able to use lethal force to defend themselves and their property isn't one I would call higher "trust" than one that maintains the same crime levels without that threat.
I think that is the wrong way to think about it.
The end state is you can trust others because nobody even wants to or considers it.
Punishing violators is being proposed as how to build the norm that no one wants to steal.
It's almost never $2k and then they go to live a normal life. You don't shoot them there they steal yet again and maybe harm someone in the process. I was a victim a theft a few times and violent assault 2 times. Although I managed to escape both times and could afford to replace my property I wish someone else shot them or I had a chance to do it - as a favor to future victims.
Ah, but that’s not the choice. The choice is whether there exist probability p, life L, and material possession m such that the possession is worth more than p times L.
The conclusion that there is no such triad seems clearly absurd since we allow people to build things for us the construction of which offers them a non-zero chance of death.
It is reasonable to say that a precise frontier is not describable because of Sorites but to say no triad exists implies that you only participate in an economy consisting exclusively of zero risk behaviour[0] That seems improbable.
Once we’ve dealt with that, perhaps we may be able to conclude that catalytic converters exist on one side of the frontier or on the other side or perhaps we might say that they lie along the Sorites boundary.
0: we are not unreasonable. We might even choose to consider imperfect information about the risk, the risk being at a Pareto optimum, the risk being at optimum against counterfactual, etc.
A great example of this triad is driving a car: many people choose to do so every day and a small but not insignificant fraction of them will die because of it.
That's not cliché; Texas is the only state that applies stand-your-ground to crimes against property alone.
You’re removing context by referring to a generic “human life” as if we don’t have more information than that.
No, your comment sounds incredibly privileged and naive.
It's easy to say that. Not so easy to take responsibility for those views and compensate the victim which is often forced to work several months to cover the damage, may lose their job or their life is otherwise negatively affected.
"Let's not harm the thief but force the victim to cover the damages" is what it comes down to and imo it's a very immoral stance.
its not about the money. its about the threat to your life.
A mugger may be stealing $50 in your wallet, but the crime is the threat to your life.
This sounds great in theory, and I used to agree, but:
a. There's no guarantee against escalation, a property crime turns into a violent crime very easily.
b. Property crime can have a deep psychological impact on the victim - something the perpetrator demonstrably gives zero fucks about.
c. The police and justice system in 2026 don't care about prosecuting property crime. Having no recourse at all if you're being robbed (a common situation when defending your own property is effectively illegal because of the risk to the perpetrator) is grossly unfair.
The thief shouldn't value something more than his life then.
this is so untrue, gullible and naive. so if I steal your home, your car, your food, your water, and everything material, and you end up starving and dead or stranded on the side of a ride in a desert where no ones coming to help you - are you are saying that is ok since that stuff can be replaced?
You absolutely can cause death to a human and take a human life through material theft.
Life is pretty easy to make actually
The life of most of the people who steal catalytic converters is not worth much.
I would love to live in a world where thieves feared for their lives.
Sounds like Texas is the place for you.
No, I think their civil forfeiture rates are quite a bit higher than average. Property taxes too. Quite a bit of fearless thievery going on in Texas.
Yet I believe crime still happens in Texas.
Try Saudi Arabia or Iran
This is why Texas has the lowest rate of crime in the US.
Is this irony? Judging by https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/crime-rate-... it’s not true.
It has to be true, otherwise exabrial's wish isn't about lowering crime rates; it's based on something else.
You want thieves to be armed?
It's much more safe for a law abiding citizen to assume that all thieves are armed, because they most likely are.
Burglars in particular tend to target empty houses precisely to avoid confrontation. To bring a weapon only make sense if there is a chance of getting shot at.
Isn't "crime, done with the involvement of a firearm" also often more harshly punished than the plain crime itself? If a burglar is targeting empty houses, this would give them a strong incentive to not bring a firearm, just in case they get caught.
As the saying goes, only break one law at a time!
That’s awful, it’s terrible that the thieves fear for their lives so much that they arm themselves
They frequently already are. Even here in Canada[1] where any kind of "carry" is generally not allowed. Shockingly, thieves often don't care about gun laws though.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-police-cash-r...
I think that world largely exists. There are some counties in Texas where crime is essentially negligible.
I live a few minutes away from one of the facilities where capital punishment is administered. The local community is extremely pleasant. I don't bother locking my doors at home or at the grocery store. The only place any real crime occurs is within a few hundred yards of the interstate. Target and Home Depot get robbed occasionally, but that's about it around here. I don't think it's physically possible to steal from my local Home Depot without ending up in the flock database. The geometry and overlapping coverage they have is pretty crazy now. You can tell they waged a full scale war against an army of meth addicts and won decisively. Every time I go into that store looking for a Milwaukee product, I find it in stock and unmolested.
At no point do I worry about a western style shootout with a bandit. The most prolific criminal around here has 4 legs and only really cares for the contents of particular trash cans and gardens.
Texas has among the highest crime rates in the country, 17th for violent crime, even worse for property crime. Given the wealth of Texas, having such high crime rates is even more embarrassing (crime and poverty go hand in hand, but Texas doesn't have that excuse). In short, you're talking out of your ass.
wealth and inequality (and so poverty) also go hand in hand.
For a few to be very wealthy, the many may remain impoverished.
You can use force in Texas to stop property crime.
Fire away, I guess.
What an insane trade off. Seems like a few bait cars and a couple of trackers would be plenty to figure out where the converters are getting fenced. Obviously there is a small number of buyers driving the entire catalytic theft economy.
Stealing an EV battery is harder than stealing a cat.
EV batteries weigh hundreds of kilos. They typically require a mechanical workshop with a hoist to remove, not something your typical theif could easily steal on a street corner.
For a country that staged a revolution over a tea tax modern Americans sure seem to love having their rights trampled.
Because many people agree with having cameras to help reduce/monitor crimes.
From their views, the right isn't trampled. It's a win
What right does a Flock camera violate?
Carpenter v. United States and the supporting opinion written by John Roberts in 2018 reaffirms that ongoing electronic surveillance requires a search warrant and constitutes a violation of the 4th amendment.
I don't live in the US, but it seems that constant monitoring via government sanctioned facial recognition technology falls under that umbrella.
Carpenter only covers cell data and was specifically meant to apply narrowly to that type of info.
Good thing that there isn't a court in the United States that exists solely to make those kinds of distinctions and revise previous interpretations of the law in order to apply them to an evolving legal landscape.
Flock cameras using facial recognition to surveil citizens in public spaces without a warrant is a 4th amendment violation under any rational reading, and it is up to the American people whether they want to live in country that no longer holds itself accountable to the law or not.
It really has no impact on my life beyond the looming existential crisis of the world's largest military and nuclear power slowly becoming a rogue fascist state.
Not American, but
1. I don't think Texas was around during the Tea Party, and
2. Property is also a right, so this is just about how much privacy you are willing to sacrifice for how much property.
I've yet to hear a convincing connection between driving down a public road and having privacy - in fact, the outside of a registered motor vehicle on a public road is about as non-private as you can expect.
You already have a unique plate tied to the registered owner of the car, and a range of court cases have held you can be stopped, ordered out of the car, questioned (by both police and immigration enforcement), etc.
It's not about your vehicle being seen in public at a single point in time, it's the fact that this system captures everyone's patterns of life. School, doctor, shooting range, church, play, protest. When, when, how often. All tracked and packaged up in a commercial database, without warrant or justification.
If you happened upon me on a public street, I'd say "that I'm here on this street now is not private information".
If you installed sensors across the entire city with 2-5 block resolution and could tell me everywhere I have been in the last 30 days (and hence where I'm liable to be tomorrow), I'd say "you are grossly violating my right to be secure in my person against unreasonable search - this is wrong".
Right to privacy, is this not mega-obvious?
"Right to privacy" isn't a specific right in the US. Furthermore, being in the middle of a public roadway in a registered vehicle shouldn't confer the expectation of privacy, per Katz. Probably the closest case law is Carpenter, which only covers cell data and was specifically meant to apply narrowly to that type of info.
Ok, it's not called a "right", it's the fourth amendment, and federal statutes and state laws and whatnot.
You got me there, pal ;) I didn't use the exact technical terms you expected, my argument is now void, nooo.
I guess I should go and install one of those cameras right outside my house now.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" in case you forgot.
I'm not saying you have to reply in a technical term - just explain how being seen and recorded driving down a public street, in a vehicle that's required to display an identifiable plate you've registered with the government, constitutes a search, seizure, or even an invasion of your privacy.
Nobody's saying you have to install a camera outside your house (ignoring the dozens of cameras your neighbors have willingly installed to replace their doorbell or to deter theft/burglary). But you can't argue that the government or private businesses can't deploy cameras because you expect privacy in the middle of a road.
To have a high trust society you need to know who you are dealing with. That's why we don't cover our faces when interacting with others or walking around. Same with driving. If anything there is too much privacy - we should know who drives irresponsibly, is a danger etc.
Privacy is about being in your home away from others, correspondence etc. Once you are interacting with others it's not a feature.
Over a tea tax without representation. Very common to forget that part!
Do 84 year olds on life support count as representation?
According to voting turnout: yes. That's the thing the 70+ year old voterbase learned from their peak working year.
And yet there are still so many working class people who try to profess how "voting is useless, it doesn't change anything".
In American style representative democracy there certainly are places where voting is useless depending on your political affiliation.
Useless because everyone around you genuinely thinks differently from you? Or useless because said 70+ yo retired asset owners with more means to vote without more than the working class?
Big difference in issue. You can't gerrymander a local bill so those kinds of votes are arguably more important than nationals. And you'd be surprised how big a difference a visit with a few dozen of your peers can make to a townhall meeting. That's something we seem to forget until our backs are truly to a wall.
Only if you are too stubborn to register as the dominant party and vote in the primary.
"Voting works, you just need to compromise your beliefs and pretend to be someone that hates everything you believe in to participate!"
Hallmark of a healthy democracy.
Yep. We asked for the nightmare we've brought upon ourselves
Weird how people view "Americans" as different species. Never have I seen someone say "Europeans", "Germans"...
"These Americans", "Modern Americans".
You've never seen someone refer to Europeans or Germans..?
The term is "nationality", it describes a person's legal bond and citizenship tied to a specific country, usually gained by birth or naturalization.
If you have never heard of that before then someone failed you during your education.
Given how unpopular these cameras are, and how sloppy their security has been, I have come to assume there's boatloads of bribery happening. I can't come up with any other explanation for how willing police chiefs and city councilors and mayors are to get yelled at at city council meetings and how wantonly they're giving away the privacy of their constituents.
I'm guessing that as scrutiny increases, we'll begin to hear about questionable, at best, sales tactics, if not outright bribery. Trips, sponsored speaking/training engagements that puts money in the pockets of cops and policymakers, etc. The whole thing stinks of it.
It’s been proven (at least in the Minnesota flock conference) that flock pays politicians and police as private contractors and commissions them on any potential contracts they bring to flock
Strange that someone else’s question “Did it reduce catalytic converter theft?”, directly relevant to the article, got downvoted to death. Not sure if we’re meant to have discussions here or just dutifully complain about topics that are fashionable to complain about.
I agree. I "revived" the comment by clicking on the timestamp ("33 minutes ago") and then clicking "vouch". I believe only users with a score of 200+ (points? karma?) can do so.
Been here 8 years, always wondered how comments died. I assumed it was algorithmic. TIL
“[dead]” usually means algorithmic (could be as simple as an account registered via Tor that hasn’t been vouched for enough times). “[flagged][dead]” usually means it was flag-killed by users, except I’ve been noticing some AI written comments that are flagged instead of just dead, but they’re minutes old so unlikely to be user flagged.
There's been an "AI comment detect" algo trialed and running for a month or so now.
If you see any probably human comments tagged as Mr Roboto either vouch (weak indication, needs a few others to boost) or email hn@<this site> for dang / tom to cast a meat based eyeball over it.
I wondered that too. It doesn't say, but does state: "Data from the license plate readers, known in law enforcement as LPRs, was searched 62,000 times in 2025, leading to about 1,660 cleared catalytic converter theft cases, a report from the authority said."
Also, how many missing people are there? finding 10k seems quite a lot. “one of the most effective ways Flock has been able to help find, just last year, over 10,000 missing persons”.
The term "missing person" calls to mind someone who is in serious danger, but a majority are something minor, like someone quitting a job without notice or taking an unannounced trip. The vast majority are resolved by finding the person alive.
Flock helping close 10K cases doesn't surprise me at all, but it doesn't meant those people wouldn't have been found without it. It may mean less work for the police, but the police don't usually put a lot of effort into a missing person without evidence they're in danger.
Based on the cited document, "leading to" seems entirely made up.
So to fight abuse and overreach by your leaders, you can:
- give up your car/vehicle propery
- let an LLC take ownership
- reside in the privacy protections of LLC and corporation
I don't think any successful case has happened yet where flock et al have pierced the corporate veil to get address information, nor dug into insurance records to find who the LLC-license plates belong to.
i don’t think that will help anything. surely flock and similar companies use facial recognition features? particularly at every stores parking lot that has these in it?
and i’d be more shocked if the same stores weren’t already sharing their own inside cameras facial recognition directly with companies like flock already.
and from what we’ve seen, these companies cameras are linked up with names from frequent shopper cards, cc data, what people buy, when they buy it, etc…
The fact that corporations have more privacy rights than people is dystopian.
It would be, you're right.
Did it reduce catalytic converter theft?
I doubt it helped much directly. The nationwide ring that was dismantled recently was busted partially due to surveillance from a pole mounted camera though. The article title initially baited my rage, but I can plausibly see how LPRC's could be used to track catalytic converter thieves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932022_catalytic_co...
(a pole mounted camera for which a warrant had been obtained...)
As it should be.
Jeez, in not normally cynical but the Japanese buyer faced no charges and this has bad optics:
> Janice Ayala joined Dowa Metals & Mining America as their Chief Compliance Officer on March 3, 2023. During Ayala's 27-year tenure at the Department of Homeland Security, her most recent role before joining Dowa was as Director of Joint Task Force – Investigations. This agency oversaw the investigation into both DG Auto Parts and Dowa.
To quote from https://www.txdmv.gov/sites/default/files/body-files/MVCPA_F...
Number of times an ALPR was deployed. 61,875
Number of LPR Deployments by taskforce investigators 42,878
Number of vehicles recovered from LPR detection 1,963
Number of Cleared Cases – Catalytic Converter Theft 1,658
Number of arrests from LPR detection 569
Number of identified/documented prolific catalytic converter theft offenders 266
Number of Catalytic Converter Theft bait operations 236
The problem is they don't define "deployments". There are ~13,500 ALPR cameras and they do thousands of plates per hour and neither of those numbers matches the deployment. My best guess is it is a targeted search and so a vehicle is recovered or a case is cleared 2-3 times out of every 100 times they search the database.
Regarding actual reduction, as another comment said, the amount of crime fluctuates with metal prices, pretty much lockstep. But at least they can lock the people away.
It’s hard to say. As the economic got better, trade policies stabilized and the price of commodities and therefore the metals in a converter dropped in value. As the price of the metals went down, the thefts dropped nationally. Texas thefts seemed to have dropped inline with the national trend. Since the supply side issues are picking up again, the thefts are going up likewise.
If what you say is true it doesn’t sound hard to say at all, it seems clear that the cameras didn’t reduce the thefts at all.
Doesn't seem especially likely, does it? People report the thefts in unmonitored neighborhoods. The police... check the nearby intersection cameras for any vehicles passing between 11pm and 4am?
As much as I think the tech needs to be regulated to prevent abuse, if I was a driver in San Francisco I’d try to only ever park my car directly in view of a flock camera.
Snooping Bastards !