Comment on Don’t you lie to me
kungen@feddit.nu 1 day agoNew York Personal Property Law § 252; it doesn’t have any name, it’s just an unclassified misdemeanor.
But we actually have a word for this type of offence in Sweden, “fyndförseelse” (discovery misdemeanor? Not very easy to translate). Basically, if you find something, you have to return it immediately (if you’re aware of who the owner is), and if unknown you need to leave it to the police as soon as possible. But the fun part is, if the rightful owner doesn’t make a claim within 3 months, you become the legal owner and can do what you want with it.
My apartment is right by several bars, and my backyard is one of the more secluded places in the area, so I end up finding stuff all the time; clocks, jewelery, etc, from people who think it’s more appropriate to piss on my wall and grass instead of using the bar’s toilet. Most of them claim their stuff, and that makes me happy, and the rest I can choose to sell or donate it to the government.
So if the NYPD isn’t lying in that article, I don’t see any “gotcha” with it… other than there’s probably more impactful stuff they could be doing.
sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Well it’s something like entrapment. They’re just creating fake crimes to catch people. It’s like making a robot who antagonizes a pedestrian until the pedestrian assaults the robot, and then charging the pedestrian with assault even though it was a non-feeling robot.
kungen@feddit.nu 1 day ago
Giving an opportunity isn’t entrapment. It would be if someone said “hey dude, that girl there dropped her phone, do you want it?”
But yeah I get what you mean, and that’s what I meant with “there’s probably more impactful stuff they could be doing instead”… Because no one who does finders-keepers on someone else’s personal belongings (when they can easily see the owner) is a good person tbh.
Normal people lose their stuff all the time; it’s a good thing if opportunistic thieves think again before considering hurting an actual person, instead of just being a quota-filler.