It happens right in front of my house. Addicts steal things at shops, sell them at a pawn shop, buy drugs from a dealer waiting right in front of the pawn shop (difficult not to notice: the only guy who wears a black hoodie in the middle of a hot day), then inject the drugs behind the pawn shop.
When the shops are closed, or the addicts draw too much attention from the security, they try breaking into our houses and cellars instead. Every door in the neighborhood has signs of an attempt to pry it open.
What can we do about this?
Make shop theft impossible? Unlikely to happen, they would need to have the security literally everywhere.
Prevent the pawn shop from buying stolen stuff? I don’t understand the details, but I was told that if they make the seller sign a paper saying “I totally swear I didn’t steal this”, they are legally ok. The pawn shop owner definitely knows that he deals with stolen stuff; that’s why he moves everything between the shops, so that when they rob your house, you won’t find your stuff in the shop window on your street the next day.
Prevent the dealer from selling drugs? That’s quite tricky, legally, because owning a small amount of drug “for your own use” is not illegal here. Of course the dealer only brings one small bag of powder each time. Also, you pay to one guy, and get the powder from another guy, so it is legally tricky to determine at which moment exactly the drug was sold. (The first guy didn’t give you any drug, and the second guy didn’t take any money from you. If you only catch one of them, he will probably claim it was just a misunderstanding.)
So our only remaining option is to form a vigilante squad, and… well, I am not going to write down anything that may or may not happen afterwards. Didn’t expect this to happen to me, and yet, here I am.
Reducing penalties for drug use is a well-sounding idiocy. In theory, you reduce the penalties for drug use, but in practice, you reduce the penalties for drug distribution, because most of the time when you catch a dealer, he can argue that this was all for his own use. And he only takes with him one bag of powder at a time. Yes, in theory it is possible to find the store full of bags, but you just made it needlessly complicated. When drug possession is a crime, you can catch the dealer, he says it was for his own use, you arrest him anyway. (Ideally, you would give him exponentially increasing sentences, starting with community service.)
I wonder whether legalizing and reducing penalties for drug use is causal for property crime—drug addicts famously do theft to get substances.
It happens right in front of my house. Addicts steal things at shops, sell them at a pawn shop, buy drugs from a dealer waiting right in front of the pawn shop (difficult not to notice: the only guy who wears a black hoodie in the middle of a hot day), then inject the drugs behind the pawn shop.
When the shops are closed, or the addicts draw too much attention from the security, they try breaking into our houses and cellars instead. Every door in the neighborhood has signs of an attempt to pry it open.
What can we do about this?
Make shop theft impossible? Unlikely to happen, they would need to have the security literally everywhere.
Prevent the pawn shop from buying stolen stuff? I don’t understand the details, but I was told that if they make the seller sign a paper saying “I totally swear I didn’t steal this”, they are legally ok. The pawn shop owner definitely knows that he deals with stolen stuff; that’s why he moves everything between the shops, so that when they rob your house, you won’t find your stuff in the shop window on your street the next day.
Prevent the dealer from selling drugs? That’s quite tricky, legally, because owning a small amount of drug “for your own use” is not illegal here. Of course the dealer only brings one small bag of powder each time. Also, you pay to one guy, and get the powder from another guy, so it is legally tricky to determine at which moment exactly the drug was sold. (The first guy didn’t give you any drug, and the second guy didn’t take any money from you. If you only catch one of them, he will probably claim it was just a misunderstanding.)
So our only remaining option is to form a vigilante squad, and… well, I am not going to write down anything that may or may not happen afterwards. Didn’t expect this to happen to me, and yet, here I am.
Reducing penalties for drug use is a well-sounding idiocy. In theory, you reduce the penalties for drug use, but in practice, you reduce the penalties for drug distribution, because most of the time when you catch a dealer, he can argue that this was all for his own use. And he only takes with him one bag of powder at a time. Yes, in theory it is possible to find the store full of bags, but you just made it needlessly complicated. When drug possession is a crime, you can catch the dealer, he says it was for his own use, you arrest him anyway. (Ideally, you would give him exponentially increasing sentences, starting with community service.)