The argument didn't go well not because the cop doesn't understand but because the cop doesn't care when the bike got stolen, how it got stolen, who stole it or that it was stolen at all.<p>I had an expensive motorbike stolen. It had a tracker so I could see exactly when it was stolen, where they took my poor bike to remove the tracker etc. I gave all this data to the cops and they did precisely nothing whatsoever about it.<p>They don't care at all about bike theft.
The cops have tools they can put video through which tell them the sus activities at the station, and even match potential suspects. Any kind of human based search is super naive unless these tools fail to work.
Always cool reading a HN post to a reaction Tweet/Toot of a screenshot, from a newspaper article, about something the reporter read in a chatroom, that happened to someone else.<p>That is a form of humor, but obviously cops know binary search and any smart person wouldn't get this joke.<p>They'd be thinking, having actually searched video for an incident it's a PiTA. It's not just half, half, half. You won't necessarily be able to see the bike well. The store won't want to hand over everything they have to a cop who doesn't even know when it happened.... did it happen, is the cop lying if they know so little?<p>Not great cops having the right to search all footage to the dawn of humanity without a warrant either.<p>But I guess for a kid in high school having learned an algorithm they can pwn cops with (in their head) it's more funny.<p>The missing next paragraph from the newspaper article -<p>"I made a (slightly more diplomatic) nuisance of myself and they eventually looked at the footage. The policewoman I dealt with was lovely about it, but in the end the image wasn’t clear. Maybe they were right not to bother."