Jul 13, 2008

Several car break ins

Location: Miller Triangle - the little area next to my house (20th & John).

Observation: three separate little piles of broken car window glass seen over the last few days. One car with broken window still there (and it had a "Club")

Question: is this happening elsewhere in the neighborhood or is our little area (which seems to be a visitor parking area for the neighborhood) especially blessed? Any clever ideas about what to do?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I've come to the conclusion that every night of every day in every neighborhood someone is walking around checking car doors for easy stealin'. This is because the few times in my life that I have accidentally left mine unlocked someone has come along and stolen stuff.

Your problem is just that they aren't finding as many easy targets, so they have to work for it a little more.

My vigilante side wants to sit in the bushes at night with a branding iron that says "thief" and a bat. When the inevitable asshat comes around I'll clobber him (or her) and permanently brand "thief" on their forehead. Cruel? Yes. Deserving? Possibly.

A more effective (at least in the long term) and less illegal measure would be to install better lighting, trim trees/bushes back to let more street lighting come through and make sure all neighbors leave porch lights on. Thieves like the dark and will generally avoid well-lit areas.

Car alarms, while annoying, are a good deterrent. Even though everyone ignores them, thieves don't want to be hanging around having attention drawn to their activities.

Finally, much like cleaning up graffiti, you should clean up those piles of glass immediately. It shows the thieves that people care about the neighborhood, are paying attention and makes sure that us bike riders don't end up with flats.

Unknown said...

I saw this broken car window a few blocks away

Wesa said...

We leave the car unlocked and don't leave anything valuable in it. We've found it a few times with the penny cup empty and the glove compartment rifled through, but the windows are intact. This wouldn't work if you have one of the top number of cars that are stolen, but it works for the others.