Comment by Mountain_Skies

Atlanta has one of the highest surveillance cameras per capita rates in the world and people who live in certain neighborhoods there know to leave their car doors unlocked to avoid getting their windows smashed. Having lots of cameras don't do you any good if no one watches or reviews them. Also many of these thieves are already well known to the police and get little more than time-served when they go before a judge for the nth time for the same crime. The jail there has been chronically overflowing for decades, even after multiple court decrees declaring such overcrowding to be illegal. There's little appetite to keep expanding jail space, so even if judges started handing out harsher sentences, unless the crime becomes one that requires prison rather than jail, there's no where to put the thieves when caught.