Quite the contrary, at least with austrian police. My pedelec (e-bike, worth around 4.000 €) got stolen at 3am a while ago and it had a GPS tracker.
I called the equivalent of 911 and briefly explained. The said: "wait, we pick you up", and in the same moment I hear sirens a few streets later heading in my direction. What followed was out of a movie. We raced with emergency lights to the current location, constantly updading other units on the current position. We must have missed the thief only by seconds and found construction containers where the signal was coming from. The police said they would call the construction companys 24h contact and open the containers with them, but I could go home for now.
One hour later the GPS tracker said the bike was moving again. I called again and the operator of emergency services said "didn't you call before?" and they picked me up again. When we arrived at the - now outdoor - location of the bike, there were 5 police cars and 15 police around it, but no thief, it was locked to a regular bike stand. They called in the equivalent of SWAT to open the lock and I got my bike back. They took fingerprints of the lock and luckily the thief stopped at an residential address for a minute or two, so we figured that might be the home address. Investigation is ongoing.
I could more or less prove that I was the owner by having the dealers invoice, serial number and pictures on my phone btw.
I was really shocked by a friend in Los Angeles that was mugged at gun point from their car and the police did essentially nothing.
The audience here on Hacker News has a pretty realistic idea of how quickly you can track down the location of people using a set of credit cards that are known-- not to mention two phones which were also stolen and shockingly not powered down. I am not saying that the process is infallible, but there are companies I have worked for where you could have given the known information (phones, credit cards) and they could have tracked down the location in real time with a 70-80% certainty.
Catching car jackers with a 70% certainty (or 33% even) will shut down a car jacking ring pretty quick. This sort of crime is exploding in Los Angeles this year.
That the police don't try as hard to track a person down as a mobile ad server would, makes me wonder about the incentives to curb crime.
The only solution I have found for preventing thefts from my construction sites in St. Louis is to pay a stipend to local economically disadvantaged people to live at the site, and provide firearms for the purpose of discouraging thieves. At the request of the St. Louis city police, we stopped reporting incidents of attempted theft.
The DA in my area recently stopped attending murder trials. This is what the powers that be want. When the prosecutor does not show up in court, the case cannot proceed.
Yes, there is a substantial portion of the population that believes it is inhumane for the police to arrest a black man if he does not really feel like being arrested.
I called the equivalent of 911 and briefly explained. The said: "wait, we pick you up", and in the same moment I hear sirens a few streets later heading in my direction. What followed was out of a movie. We raced with emergency lights to the current location, constantly updading other units on the current position. We must have missed the thief only by seconds and found construction containers where the signal was coming from. The police said they would call the construction companys 24h contact and open the containers with them, but I could go home for now.
One hour later the GPS tracker said the bike was moving again. I called again and the operator of emergency services said "didn't you call before?" and they picked me up again. When we arrived at the - now outdoor - location of the bike, there were 5 police cars and 15 police around it, but no thief, it was locked to a regular bike stand. They called in the equivalent of SWAT to open the lock and I got my bike back. They took fingerprints of the lock and luckily the thief stopped at an residential address for a minute or two, so we figured that might be the home address. Investigation is ongoing.
I could more or less prove that I was the owner by having the dealers invoice, serial number and pictures on my phone btw.