Its an information/risk asymmetry problem too right.
For an individual its better to be safe than sorry on something like a stalking incident.
For the cops dealing with a plethora of complaints, on average, most of these resolve to nothing..
Further, these complaints often come with unspecific information thus requiring some amount of surveillance, some of which is easier for the victim to do (put cameras up your own property) than they are able to do legally, especially without a warrant.
Further, with some information in-hand from surveillance, the victim also has access to all their own social media/etc accounts that you can try and make connections between whatever information you collect.
Most people are probably not going to be be OK with "sure we can help you, but we need to put cameras on your property, car and permission to login to all your social media accounts / email / texts, is that ok?"
Obviously this is not ideal, but the vast majority of cops are not detectives. They aren't sending out their best to every seemingly minor call.
I had a friend involved in a domestic incident and when the cops showed up, because she had fought back enough, they both showed evidence of a struggle, and the guy lied about incident. So the cops spent less than an hour on site, shrugged their shoulders and dragged them both off to lockup to go sort it out with a judge in the morning.
One alternative is maybe she didn't fight back and the cops would have seen only marks on her neck and took only him away, maybe. The other alternative is, she didn't fight back, and he choked her to death.
It's often better to fight back than to let yourself get killed while waiting for law enforcement, but there's also a risk that whatever contact with law enforcement you make will not go precisely your way, immediately, without side effects.
>Now it was time to call 999. My sister had already had a couple of police visits about the previous incidents, so they knew there was a problem linked to her flat and came round pretty quickly.
I know this story is in the UK, but at least in the US you absolutely should assume they will not help, and depending on the circumstances will make the situation even worse. They have no duty to do anything to help, and no consequences if they don't.
> "Masked guy repeatedly visits at night to write threatening messages on car of single woman living alone" is... about as explicit as you can get.
Or alternatively its an invitation for a police officer or a department to suddenly need to do a lot of work that they could just...not do. No skin off their back if someone is being harassed or stalked, and if something worse happens, they can investigate then. Why spend the resources now after all?
Why would they? They get bombarded with people them to f-over or harass someone they got beef with all the time. And most of those sob stories they get told have two sides to them. The false positive ratio is too high to be worth taking these complaints seriously let alone at face value.
Do you have sources about false positive ratios of stalking, vandalism, etc? My understanding is that sexually-oriented crimes actually have a very low rate of false accusations, but I didn't look into it deeply and I only heard of it like 5+ years ago so maybe something's changed? Let me know if you have updated data.
> my sister updated the police on our significant evidence haul and the police agreed that they had enough to at least arrest him and question him
There’s no evidence the cops would have acted on just a complaint. Anecdotally, I know several people who’ve struggled to get the cops to take stalking seriously.
