I understand the goal of this sentiment, but this is not how most societies work. Equality under the law is the proper ideal, but it's not at all how things work. There are a lot of reasons for that, from bias to lack of resources. But whatever the particular reason may be, most people only notice and complain about inequality when they are its losing side.
Make no mistake about it though, from the police at the bottom of the stack, all the way up to how the judges rule on cases at the top of the stack, the legal system has never been equitable.
Laws and budgets are set on different time-scales; there is never 100% alignment between the cost of enforcing the law and the availability of the budget required.
In fact, most of the time, there's very little alignment, because there's no incentive to have those things be aligned. Sometimes even disincentive: there are laws on the books nobody wants enforced, and a culture in policing of enforcing the letter of the law, not the spirit—but one can always choose to not enforce a law one doesn't agree with by just making an informal agreement that certain crimes (of basically equal severity) take enforcement priority, such that those crimes nobody sees as crimes just get "de-prioritized" to the point that they're never enforced at all.
No, the law does not and should not use maximum resources for everyone. It is clearly beneficial to not send whole teams of people looking for weeks for your stolen wallet like they would for a missing person.
>The ROI calculations are to be budgeted and accounted for
Often this would require you to pay more in tax than the value you would get back from it. Are you ok paying $1000 to track down the person who smashed your window when you will likely never get any money from them or will you just pay the $100 it costs to get a new window which doesn't happen very often.
Personally, I would vastly prefer cops focused on minor property crimes. That’s not to say the need a statewide manhunt, but something approaching 1:1 of property damage vs police respond quickly adds up to several hours of investigation.
Generally, a tiny fraction of the population commits the vast majority of such crimes. People will do 500$ worth of damage to make 30$, work out what it takes to make useful amounts of money and these people end up destroying a lot of property. So, the ROI calculation needs to account for windows not smashed.
A good example is copper wire thieves. They pull up to a house and access the electrical panel in the garage which they turn off. Using a winch, they pull out all the copper wire in the house that's directly connected to the box (there's also many branch lines left behind). They then sell the wire as scrap for $20 or so and presumably use the money to buy drugs.
Fixing this damage can run $30,000 to $100,000. The whole house can have to be torn apart from the inside to reinstall all the electrical.
> It is clearly beneficial to not send whole teams of people looking for weeks for your stolen wallet like they would for a missing person.
A massive miscalculation -- stolen wallets, cell phones etc are individually small-ticket items, but the criminals who make a living stealing them do hundreds per month and thousands per year. Taking the perpetrator of a thousand muggings or pickpocketings off the street is a job worth doing, possibly more so than chasing small time drug dealers or runaway teens.
San Francisco doesn't want the law applied equally to everyone: that would preserve existing structural injustices. We want the law applied towards equality, cutting down the rich and lifting up the poor.
Punishing an already poor and marginalized person is counterproductive to that goal, so we try to avoid it as much as possible. And that's probably who you're going to find on the other end of a car break in. So why bother looking?
I respect the law, and the lawmakers should work for me. The ROI calculations are to be budgeted and accounted for, otherwise why am I being taxed?