[marcher]

The continual lack of police action wasn’t super surprising, but as someone who lives in SF, it does bum me out. The supposed inability to enter based on reasonable suspicion or make arrests in certain situations also baffled me.

I definitely wouldn’t want an unnecessarily brutal police force, but I wonder if we could empower them to do just a tiny bit more and be more generally useful to those who live and work here.

[cameldrv]

If the issue is that they need a warrant to enter someone's house, perhaps they should simply get one. I'm not a lawyer but it seems to me that find my iPhone reporting that someone's phone was in someone else's house would constitute probable cause.

[shaftway]

My gut reaction is to agree, but after a deeper thought I'm not sure. Let's say you wanted to weaponize this. How would you do it?

You could follow someone with a nice bike, throw an airtag on the roof and claim that the bike was stolen from you. Most people don't have specific enough proof of purchase to refute this.

You could actually commit a crime, as happened to the author, and then throw her keys on the roof of the house of someone you didn't like, framing them.

These both seem like inevitable outcomes if the policy was reversed.

[aidenn0]

From my 25 year old civics class, I seem to remember 4 reasons police could enter a home:

1. They have a warrant

2. They are invited in by an occupant

3. Reasonable belief that someone's life may be in danger

4. Reasonable belief that they may intercept a crime in progress

I certainly don't know California's law well enough to say if #4 would apply; the theft has already happened. If the owner asks for their property back you might be able to justify "withholding stolen property" but that seems like a stretch.

[AdamJacobMuller]

> The supposed inability to enter based on reasonable suspicion

I think this is an issue where the courts and police have not caught up with technology. Two decades ago geolocation technology in-use with cell phone triangulation was so obtuse that you could maybe get to the block where a stolen thing was. A decade ago with GPS you could get within meters, enough to know if it was in a specific house given enough separation, but, not nearly enough for an apartment building with vertical considerations or row housing / townhouses.

Today, with AirTags at least with Ultrawideband stuff, you can fairly definitively say that an AirTag is in a specific apartment and even more precisely. I think many cops and courts still have a view of geolocation as it was 10 or 20 years ago. If something is geolocated with an AirTag and Ultrawideband it should meet probable cause requirements for a proforma search warrant application able to be issued over the phone by a judge.

[tdeck]

Are we certain that they aren't empowered? I suspect the police department refuses to do their job to put pressure on the public and gain leverage for things they want, whether or not those things are necessary to address specific cases they're ignoring.