Kind of a moot point? Enforcing the law operates on a different level of desired outcome than the goods itself are worth. imagine you get your phone stolen and instead of retrieving it they bought you a new one creates a pretty perverse incentive structure!

Are you suggesting that police services should operate like a service for hire? It isn't clear to me if you think the victim should hire the police to investigate (and thus decide if their price is lower than re-purchasing the item) or if you think the police are only expected to investigate based on the value of the item.

In either case it doesn't sound like a sound way to operate a police department. It seems like a good way to incentivize vigilantism though.

You're looking at it from a single transaction cost-benefit perspective but that's not how it works societally. If everyone in the society knew that cops will be in their front door steps with a warrant every time a phone or a laptop was stolen, they're not going to be stealing them from the get-go.

So to translate, there may be a high up front cost but the return on invest will outweigh in the long run (for higher value products, admittedly). Even if that's not the case, you're not valuing the societal cost at all!

Yeah but what else are they there for? They're paid with tax dollars, unless number of other crimes value > your crime value your statement still doesn't make sense.

And if there are enough crimes going on to mean that they can't even send a single officer to assist with a theft or burglary then that's the sign of a serious problem with wherever this place is.

Yes, but then you can push this logic to everything. Should firefighters intervene? This person dead is cheaper than alive.

Public services cannot think about making a profit, otherwise it gets dark pretty quickly.

Police officers doing anything to protect individual safety or private property costs the government money.

Whether they're helping track down a smartphone or a private jet, the victim isn't expected to reimburse them.

The benefit to society of having police spend time and money to enforce the laws in theory, is that we get to feel some sense of security in our ability to continue owning things without having to fight off raiders, or walk down a street without getting assaulted/robbed.

Past a certain point of late-stage capitalism, there might be some resultant net negative effects to society, like when the masses are starving and the police are enforcing the property rights of the top 0.1% who are hoarding 90% of wealth/food/medicine. But in that scenario the top 0.1% are unlikely to be getting involved directly to track down a single laptop