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I guess I'm kinda shocked -- won't people with a grudge (for whatever other reason) beat people up and accuse them of theft? After all, anyone can take their victim to the cops and say whatever.
Hasn't happened where I've seen it.
There's certainly a bit of common sense and due diligence involved, hopefully there are witnesses, the stolen item is found on the thief's person, they're caught red handed and so on.
The stolen item is just ... an item. Anyone can produce a backpack and say that guy stole it and my friend here saw them.
Maybe let me ask the other Popperian question -- if it happened, how would you tell? Surely if most of the time it's truly a miscreant (undoubtedly so) then you'd be (correctly) far less likely to believe it when someone says they were mistakenly or maliciously accused.
That is to say, you may have seen it and not noticed.
A backpack seems like an almost uniquely bad example. You just separate the parties and ask each a few questions about its contents and it's easy to figure out which one it belongs to.
One person is gonna know everything in and say the other guy stole it. He is going to say this whether or not the other guy actually did steal it.
The other guy said he's never seen the backpack before in his life and never stole it. Of course, he is going to say this whether or not he actually stole it.
I was envisioning a scenario where one person has it and the other says they stole it. But even in a scenario where there isn't a clear current possessor like this, in any such situation I've been even tangentially involved in, laying blame is a distant third on the priority list, behind getting it to the rightful owner and keeping the overall peace.
Frankly you're also overestimating the intelligence and planning of most people who do stuff like stealing backpacks. In my area, frankly, you're more likely to get drug-addled confusion about what's wrong with walking off with someone's backpack and why the fact that they don't own it is even relevant.
With respect, I don't think you actually read my post, or you appear (?) to be responding to something completely different.
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We have strong social networks where reputation matters a lot. If you with minimal proof accuse someone of theft that everyone knows to be a good upstanding citizen who wouldn't do such a thing then you'll be ignored completely, and if you already beat them up and they can make a convincing case they weren't in the wrong you run the risk of getting beat up even harder by those who have an interest in maintaining these social networks (basically everyone, because these networks are all we have protecting us against anarchy). And you get ostracised from polite society too and lose a ton of social standing, which you can argue matters more than losing your entire net worth in a society like ours.
Plus there's the usual social standing differences that have to be taken into account. You can never get away with beating up someone at a higher (or even the same, most of the time) social station than you, even if you really dislike them and they deserve it. E.g. if you are a low level factory worker you'd never be able to beat up a manager at a respectable company on your own, even if they were in the wrong (though why such a manager would be stealing from the house of a factory worker I have no idea, which again gives the manager an alibi and makes me more inclined to take his side if he was so accused). You'd have to build a case against them by banding together with other low level factory workers and getting someone even higher than the manager to notice the injustice and take action.
This does run the risk of the higher classes being able to tyrannize the lower classes willy nilly, which can sometimes be a problem. However on net in a completely free society the lower classes tyrannize the higher classes a lot more than the reverse (by virtue of their greater numbers and generally being shittier human beings) so this state of affairs is good for you even if you are at a middling station: the small additional risk that someone high up with unjustly bring the boot down on you is well worth the very real reduction in the probability you'll have a bad encounter with a low level scumbag, or at least it's worth it to give you the tools to deel with the scumbag. The only people who really lose out in this situation are the true lowlifes (and the very unlucky) but they deserve everything coming to them anyways.
This sounds like the perfect anarcho-tyranny.
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