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Littering and fare-dodging are hardly what one typically thinks of as a "crime" (or, well, as I said above, I'm an unrepentant multiple-time criminal along with approximately everyone I know).
Responding also to @Jiro above, this is in fact the essence of the question I'm asking - is it actually for the better to arrest criminals no matter what? No human has ever lived in a society anywhere close to a 100% capture rate for law-breakers, and I for my part am not only not ready to tear down that fence but also feeling iffy about it constantly getting pushed around and climbed over. It seems likely to me that plenty of criminals with outstanding warrants continue living a mostly positive-sum life in society; some of them may have passed by my window without breaking it, passed me by in a dark alley without mugging me, and sold me food at a convenience store. I don't think it's obvious that it's worthwhile to reduce incentives for them to do so, just so you can capture some greater percentage of them. I assume the "what's the punishment for being late?" story is pretty widely known around here, too.
Yes, stealing from and polluting the commons is bad actually.
Yeah, so is driving SUVs, not separating your garbage, making noise at night when people are trying to sleep and enjoying yourself when others have it worse than you. People still do those things at times.
The reason you shouldn't arrest triple criminals according to even the nominally criminalised subset of the mildly antisocial behaviours I have admitted to sometimes comitting above is that we would wind up arresting enough people to paralyze society immediately, and even if you postulate that things would eventually settle down in a new equilibrium where people don't litter or dodge fares ever, you'd just have created a society that is actually on average worse for everyone involved because it turns out that you lose more utility from having no choice but to walk home 20km if you lost your wallet once than you lose on over the same time period from letting the occasional fare-dodger get away with it.
SUVs have emissions standards, one could argue they should be made more strict but society has decided what the limits on the personal comfort to car pollution question are and SUV drivers are in bounds. All of your examples are doing things within the social contract. This is just so many unimpressive excuses for low trust antisocial behavior.
This isn't what happened though, is it?
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