If you want less petty crime, bring back social safety nets. Pay people better.

I'm dead serious.

- Addendum: People generally don't resort to petty crime for no good reason. They do it because some need is not being met, or they have become socially outcast due to some systemic failure. When people feel they have little autonomy to exist in a meaningful way, and even being poor is expensive and criminalised, of course you'll see petty crime everywhere. Cracking down on the "undesirables" won't make them go away, it'll just make the issue more pronounced.

Surely you realize that police states exist to protect the ones on top, and have no incentive to give a shit about the ones on the bottom.

A better economy would help more than surveiling every single persons every moves and all of their communications.

I would literally buy you a bicycle to change your mind. Or sit down and review countries where theft is minimal so we could brainstorm real solutions.

1984 was not an instruction manual.

Maybe the U.S. could stop normalizing and modelling blatant criminality as a first step, in lieu of mass warrantless surveillance. Just yesterday, the U.S. president was giving what could be generously construed as a speech, in which he said of U.S. naval activities around the Strait of Hormuz: “We’re taking the cargo. We’re taking the oil. We’re like pirates.”

Doubtful, it's never really deemed worth LEOs time to pursue bike thieves.

Wait until you get targeted politically.

Your goals are petty and short-sighted. One nice thing about the current state of economics, technology, labor and inflation is that we'll have fewer people who can only imagine suffering to the extent of having a bicycle stolen, and would not give the worst people in the world an infinite amount of power in order to prevent this from happening to them again.

The 20% of the country that thinks that shoplifting is the real problem are a problem. They will always vote for the biggest liar.

I'm right now imagining a counterfactual world where there is no property crime or physical assault, and petty reactionaries are demanding surveillance in order to keep people from swearing.

You're free to move to Singapore/South Korea/Japan whenever you want. Your USD (assuming you are one) will go far there, and if you are lucky enough to be white you will get treated like a king/queen there.

As it turns out, society is a lot more fun when there is just a bit of risk of crime. I'll 1000000000% take the additional freedom to do "stupid shit" in the USA over living in one of these boring dystopias.

If it's a choice between stealing a bike and homelessness, I'll steal a bike. So the problem is the threat of homelessness. Right?