Scooter theft success story
August 11, 2021 3:30 AM Subscribe
"My scooter was stolen last week. Unknown to the thief, I hid two Airtags inside it." Dan Guido, CEO of Trail of Bits, a digital security company, documents the steps he took to get his stolen scooter back. Threadreader.
Terrifying would be if he said "mimes shooting me", "pantomimes shooting me" ... less so?
posted by xurizaemon at 3:52 AM on August 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by xurizaemon at 3:52 AM on August 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
Modern technology kills classic movie plot once again: this is the anticlimactic remake of Pee-wee's Big Adventure.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 3:58 AM on August 11, 2021 [26 favorites]
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 3:58 AM on August 11, 2021 [26 favorites]
My partner left an airtag in our car's glovebox (to help find it in large parking lots after baseball games; we have no illusions of tracking it down if it got stolen) and I started getting these notices on my phone about someone else's airtag following me. It took me a few times to realize what it was because I kept dismissing the notice without fully reading it. But once I read it, it dawned on me about the anti-stalking thing. As a woman I honestly appreciate that feature; it shows a level of thoughtfulness a lot of tech companies don't bother with.
posted by misskaz at 4:10 AM on August 11, 2021 [40 favorites]
posted by misskaz at 4:10 AM on August 11, 2021 [40 favorites]
Limit your in-person interactions and always involve the police. Don’t try to retrieve your stolen goods until you have backup.
Since he's basing this on a sample of one, I will offer my own counter-example based on a sample of one. I was out with my daughter putting up posters for her missing trike in an area where someone had said they'd seen a middle-aged man trying and failing to ride it. Sure enough, there it was, in a park beside a homeless man's tent. I couldn't imagine any way in which calling the police would make the interaction go better, so I walked to the tent with my daughter, showed him the poster and half-apologetically said something like, "I think you've got my daughter's trike." He started on a stream of apologies and excuses, I said don't worry about it, my daughter hopped on her trike, and off we went.
I still can't imagine how that would've gone better if I had involved the police.
posted by clawsoon at 4:25 AM on August 11, 2021 [103 favorites]
Since he's basing this on a sample of one, I will offer my own counter-example based on a sample of one. I was out with my daughter putting up posters for her missing trike in an area where someone had said they'd seen a middle-aged man trying and failing to ride it. Sure enough, there it was, in a park beside a homeless man's tent. I couldn't imagine any way in which calling the police would make the interaction go better, so I walked to the tent with my daughter, showed him the poster and half-apologetically said something like, "I think you've got my daughter's trike." He started on a stream of apologies and excuses, I said don't worry about it, my daughter hopped on her trike, and off we went.
I still can't imagine how that would've gone better if I had involved the police.
posted by clawsoon at 4:25 AM on August 11, 2021 [103 favorites]
The anti stalking feature is pretty cool. We put one on each of our dogs, they were on my daughter’s phone. When she was at Dad’s for the weekend, they kept going off, seriously puzzling the dogs and myself. Like misskaz above, I didn’t read the notice that came up, and was fairly annoyed until my kids figured out the problem. We switched them to give me control and problem solved. I also gave one to my dad who just moved into a retirement community, last week. He put it on his keys, he’s used it to find them twice now and all his new buddies think that he is the technology “cool kid”.
posted by pearlybob at 4:46 AM on August 11, 2021 [10 favorites]
posted by pearlybob at 4:46 AM on August 11, 2021 [10 favorites]
Glad he got the scooter back
I imagine if he weren't White & Male, then all the interactions mentioned would have played out very differently..
[edited for typoes]
posted by Faintdreams at 5:20 AM on August 11, 2021 [22 favorites]
I imagine if he weren't White & Male, then all the interactions mentioned would have played out very differently..
[edited for typoes]
posted by Faintdreams at 5:20 AM on August 11, 2021 [22 favorites]
The fact that the police seem to be totally uninterested in actually solving a crime aligns with all my personal interactions with police over property theft.
posted by octothorpe at 5:29 AM on August 11, 2021 [86 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 5:29 AM on August 11, 2021 [86 favorites]
@ocrtothorpe: Every dealing I have had with the police on a stolen property has been It is your fault that your (thing) got stolen. How locked was it? Clearly that was not locked enough. Could people see it from outside the car? Clearly you are dumb. Did it look valuable? Well, d'oh, that's the cost of having nice things. You should be more careful.
Result: I do not call the police when my stuff gets stolen.
posted by which_chick at 5:39 AM on August 11, 2021 [19 favorites]
Result: I do not call the police when my stuff gets stolen.
posted by which_chick at 5:39 AM on August 11, 2021 [19 favorites]
"So, you guys gonna do something about this pawn shop that isn't following the laws regarding chain of custody, or are you just gonna high-five yourselves that a citizen solved a theft for you?"
posted by Kyol at 6:07 AM on August 11, 2021 [51 favorites]
posted by Kyol at 6:07 AM on August 11, 2021 [51 favorites]
> I do not call the police when my stuff gets stolen.
Even in cases where the police are sympathetic and make all the right noises, all they're going to do is take notes and build a case file. Maybe 5 years from now they'll catch the guy and he'll admit to hundreds of thefts, maybe not. But you're never seeing your scooter/bike/camera again.
The only value in calling the police for theft, even house theft, where I live is to get the police report number for the insurance claim.
posted by bonehead at 6:33 AM on August 11, 2021 [41 favorites]
Even in cases where the police are sympathetic and make all the right noises, all they're going to do is take notes and build a case file. Maybe 5 years from now they'll catch the guy and he'll admit to hundreds of thefts, maybe not. But you're never seeing your scooter/bike/camera again.
The only value in calling the police for theft, even house theft, where I live is to get the police report number for the insurance claim.
posted by bonehead at 6:33 AM on August 11, 2021 [41 favorites]
The only value in calling the police for theft, even house theft, where I live is to get the police report number for the insurance claim.
I had a police officer "investigate" my car break-in over the phone. He said "here's the report number for your insurance" and hung up.
posted by octothorpe at 6:44 AM on August 11, 2021 [18 favorites]
I had a police officer "investigate" my car break-in over the phone. He said "here's the report number for your insurance" and hung up.
posted by octothorpe at 6:44 AM on August 11, 2021 [18 favorites]
bonehead: Even in cases where the police are sympathetic and make all the right noises, all they're going to do is take notes and build a case file.
Unless you steal something from a police car, in which case it suddenly becomes obvious how quickly police can solve a crime if they care enough to do a full investigation.
posted by clawsoon at 6:45 AM on August 11, 2021 [17 favorites]
Unless you steal something from a police car, in which case it suddenly becomes obvious how quickly police can solve a crime if they care enough to do a full investigation.
posted by clawsoon at 6:45 AM on August 11, 2021 [17 favorites]
Back last summer it sounded like "reform the police" was the moderate position and "defund the police" was the extreme one, but stories like this make you realize just how radically different of a police force we'd have if we reformed them to, for instance, solve crimes.
posted by goingonit at 6:47 AM on August 11, 2021 [28 favorites]
posted by goingonit at 6:47 AM on August 11, 2021 [28 favorites]
I was disappointed. When I saw the word 'scooter' I thought it would be something cool, like a Vespa or GS.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:59 AM on August 11, 2021 [7 favorites]
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:59 AM on August 11, 2021 [7 favorites]
And yeah, no shit, a couple of winters ago someone porch pirated basically every Christmas present from our son and discarded the boxes and gift wrapping in our backyard. I was resigned that it was a lost cause, maybe Amazon could make it right when my wife called the cops to report it and they already had a suspect in custody with stolen goods on their person.
The ONE time that works. I guess they caught them in the act? But it does happen!
posted by Kyol at 7:11 AM on August 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
The ONE time that works. I guess they caught them in the act? But it does happen!
posted by Kyol at 7:11 AM on August 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
Years ago, we lived in a redbrick terrace in NE England. There was a Council house next door. The original tenants moved on and their place was taken by a young couple with 3 small kids. Before they moved in I was woken up in the wee hours and saw two young lads trying to jimmy open the new neighbour's back door. I threw open our bedroom window and the perps legged it down the street. Next day I introduced myself to the new Dad and told him about the events of the previous night. He seemed like a nice bloke but shared far too much information about how he'd just been released from 18 months in Durham Gaol for grievous bodily harm.
Fast forward a year or so; our boy left his bike in the back yard with the gate open and it disappeared. That was bad news but we sort of wrote it off. I bumped into Neighbour the next day and mentioned the theft as the most exciting thing that had happened to us since I saw him last. He didn't say much - a man more ofaffrays actions than words - but the bicycle silently reappeared in our yard that evening.
posted by BobTheScientist at 7:21 AM on August 11, 2021 [32 favorites]
Fast forward a year or so; our boy left his bike in the back yard with the gate open and it disappeared. That was bad news but we sort of wrote it off. I bumped into Neighbour the next day and mentioned the theft as the most exciting thing that had happened to us since I saw him last. He didn't say much - a man more of
posted by BobTheScientist at 7:21 AM on August 11, 2021 [32 favorites]
but stories like this make you realize just how radically different of a police force we'd have if we reformed them to, for instance, solve crimesI honestly don’t understand why the person who turns up to take my stolen-property report needs to be a cop. Honestly, it makes me vaguely uncomfortable when I need to give a statement as a crime victim and the person taking my statement turns up to my home with a gun on their hip. Why does the person investigating need to be a cop, for that matter? Surely part of the problem is that the majority of work actually solving crimes is going to be intensely tedious to your average cop, so maybe hire people who have the appropriate disposition to do that sort of work and don’t make them train as violent enforcers. Obviously there are some situations where the investigator might need to be accompanied by a professional skull-cracker, but it’s not clear at all why the skull-crackers should ever be running the show apart from maybe an active shooter situation.
Where I live, there’s a widespread belief that the cops have been on a work slowdown in retaliation for their hurt feelings last summer when the public dared suggest that officially-sanctioned goon squads were perhaps not the ideal solution to every public problem. These are the same poor underappreciated public servants who, during those same protests, had tee-shirts printed up saying “we show up early to beat the crowds.”
posted by gelfin at 7:46 AM on August 11, 2021 [67 favorites]
Where I live, there’s a widespread belief that the cops have been on a work slowdown in retaliation for their hurt feelings last summer when the public dared suggest that officially-sanctioned goon squads were perhaps not the ideal solution to every public problem.
I can assure you that the problem predates last summer. Several years ago, my apartment was broken into; the cops showed up and made a big show out of dusting for fingerprints, but that was the last I heard from them. And it's not just local or even that recent; I got the same treatment for a B&E in another state several hundred miles away about twenty years prior. The local cops (where I am now) also took a report and seemingly did nothing else when I was assaulted on the street not long after the B&E.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:03 AM on August 11, 2021 [7 favorites]
I can assure you that the problem predates last summer. Several years ago, my apartment was broken into; the cops showed up and made a big show out of dusting for fingerprints, but that was the last I heard from them. And it's not just local or even that recent; I got the same treatment for a B&E in another state several hundred miles away about twenty years prior. The local cops (where I am now) also took a report and seemingly did nothing else when I was assaulted on the street not long after the B&E.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:03 AM on August 11, 2021 [7 favorites]
When I caught my bike thieves in the eighties and involved the cops the end result was two years of violent retaliatory bullying from the thieves and all their friends with no help from the police. The only thing that saved me in the end was puberty and adolescent weight training like I was in a karate kid movie.
I have kind of been watching to see if the assholes would show up in my hometown facebook groups but so far they haven't. I'm guessing they burned so many bridges they have nobody to reconnect with.
You should be very careful about tangling with criminals in any way. I'd say ask yourself "How much would you pay to avoid a violent assault?". If what was stolen is worth less than that then don't pursue a potentially confrontational recovery. Even if you involve the police the police will not be there tomorrow or the day after or any other time you encounter the person you catch and they are very unlikely to be kindly disposed towards you and already have demonstrable poor judgement.
posted by srboisvert at 8:19 AM on August 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
I have kind of been watching to see if the assholes would show up in my hometown facebook groups but so far they haven't. I'm guessing they burned so many bridges they have nobody to reconnect with.
You should be very careful about tangling with criminals in any way. I'd say ask yourself "How much would you pay to avoid a violent assault?". If what was stolen is worth less than that then don't pursue a potentially confrontational recovery. Even if you involve the police the police will not be there tomorrow or the day after or any other time you encounter the person you catch and they are very unlikely to be kindly disposed towards you and already have demonstrable poor judgement.
posted by srboisvert at 8:19 AM on August 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
I honestly don’t understand why the person who turns up to take my stolen-property report needs to be a cop.The question is, what does it mean to be a cop? If it means wearing a blue uniform and driving a Ford Interceptor with lights on top and carrying a gun and identifying with Punisher, absolutely there's no reason for this. But ultimately there have to be people whose jobs involve going into dangerous and volatile situations (and crime scenes can absolutely be these!) and bringing the power of the state to bear on them. I think and hope that it's possible to have the people whose job this is do it better rather than try to circumscribe their roles increasingly.
posted by goingonit at 8:21 AM on August 11, 2021 [8 favorites]
I read the comments. I forgot you never read the comments.
posted by RakDaddy at 8:21 AM on August 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by RakDaddy at 8:21 AM on August 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
Yeah, they're not gonna find your Creedence tape, they're just as suspicious of the victim as the crimer. Do the minimum necessary to make your insurance happy (though it kinda sucks to have to pay for cops AND theft insurance, but this is America)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:42 AM on August 11, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:42 AM on August 11, 2021 [2 favorites]
I had a car stolen out of my driveway a couple years back and reported it to the police only because I assumed if the car ever got dumped it would eventually find its way into the impound lot, and with a report I might be more likely to hear about it. Which is what happened a month later.
Last month, I had the catalytic converter sawed off my Honda and didn't bother calling it in. I only have liability insurance so I didn't need a police report for an insurance claim, and I honestly couldn't think of any other point to contacting the police. It's gotten to the point where I can't think of any scenario at all where there would be a point in calling the police short of someone actively being in my home trying to harm me.
This is all in an extremely upper middle class / outright wealthy town where the police mostly spend their time harassing minorities driving through. This is why I find the defund debate confusing, because I can't understand how anyone can interact with police in most parts of the US and not come out of it thinking they're pointless. Are there places where police really actively try to solve and stop crime? Because if that were to happen anywhere, I would think it would happen in a wealthy area like the one where I live, but no.
posted by imabanana at 8:46 AM on August 11, 2021 [20 favorites]
Last month, I had the catalytic converter sawed off my Honda and didn't bother calling it in. I only have liability insurance so I didn't need a police report for an insurance claim, and I honestly couldn't think of any other point to contacting the police. It's gotten to the point where I can't think of any scenario at all where there would be a point in calling the police short of someone actively being in my home trying to harm me.
This is all in an extremely upper middle class / outright wealthy town where the police mostly spend their time harassing minorities driving through. This is why I find the defund debate confusing, because I can't understand how anyone can interact with police in most parts of the US and not come out of it thinking they're pointless. Are there places where police really actively try to solve and stop crime? Because if that were to happen anywhere, I would think it would happen in a wealthy area like the one where I live, but no.
posted by imabanana at 8:46 AM on August 11, 2021 [20 favorites]
When this property crime does happen, people who spend all this money on Ring doorbells & cameras are shocked to learn how little interest the police will have in going all CSI on the grainy picture that your doorbell took of a porch pirate.
posted by dr_dank at 9:13 AM on August 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by dr_dank at 9:13 AM on August 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
The fact that the police seem to be totally uninterested in actually solving a crime aligns with all my personal interactions with police over property theft.
I had the opposite reaction, I was astonished by the level of police engagement he managed to get. He got them involved two separate times, two officers gave him a lift, they came into the shop with him, took CCTV at his request.
In a city in the UK, even with all the advantages of being middle-class and white and doing the legwork for them, you would be incredibly lucky to get any assistance at all out of the police for property crime, let alone a $800 scooter that you'd left partially-unlocked.
posted by Klipspringer at 9:41 AM on August 11, 2021 [9 favorites]
I had the opposite reaction, I was astonished by the level of police engagement he managed to get. He got them involved two separate times, two officers gave him a lift, they came into the shop with him, took CCTV at his request.
In a city in the UK, even with all the advantages of being middle-class and white and doing the legwork for them, you would be incredibly lucky to get any assistance at all out of the police for property crime, let alone a $800 scooter that you'd left partially-unlocked.
posted by Klipspringer at 9:41 AM on August 11, 2021 [9 favorites]
Are there places where police really actively try to solve and stop crime?
Probably not, but there are are a lot of TV shows / movies / etc with that premise, and people believe what they see on screen.
posted by ZakDaddy at 9:47 AM on August 11, 2021 [10 favorites]
Probably not, but there are are a lot of TV shows / movies / etc with that premise, and people believe what they see on screen.
posted by ZakDaddy at 9:47 AM on August 11, 2021 [10 favorites]
My mountain bike was stolen out of my apartment garage last summer. I filed a report with the police over the phone. I think they were slightly more invested because a) it was technically a burglary, and b) to be honest, sadly, the mountain biking demographic.
Six months later they called and said it had turned up in a homeless camp. (It’s a fancy model and must have stuck out like a sore thumb.) They tracked me down through a sticker on the down tube of the shop I bought it from.
Moral of the story: be lucky, and buy renter’s insurance.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:51 AM on August 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
Six months later they called and said it had turned up in a homeless camp. (It’s a fancy model and must have stuck out like a sore thumb.) They tracked me down through a sticker on the down tube of the shop I bought it from.
Moral of the story: be lucky, and buy renter’s insurance.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:51 AM on August 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
Many years ago, I was a victim of identity theft. I needed a police report to get the creditors to stop coming after me, and to get the bad debt the person had racked up off my credit report. I went to the station, filed the report, got the affidavit, dealt with the situation, and figured that was it.
I was amazed when, a few weeks later, I heard from a detective. The identity theft was two auto loans that were defaulted on, and they figured out that it was made possible by a salesman at a shady car lot who was providing social security numbers to people who wouldn't qualify for a car loan. The guy had already moved on to parts unknown, but he had a record.
I hadn't expected anybody to do anything but file the report.
Here is a thing I don't think would happen today: the person who got the auto loans had the same first name as me (though spelled differently) and a different last name. When I asked the bank that had issued the loans why the different name hadn't struck them as a red flag, the person told me, "We figured you'd gotten married and changed your name." Amazing.
Eventually it was all resolved except that this person's name still shows up as one of my aliases on my credit reports. I gave up trying to get it resolved years ago, because I kept doing whatever the credit agencies told me to do, and it made no difference.
posted by Orlop at 9:57 AM on August 11, 2021 [9 favorites]
I was amazed when, a few weeks later, I heard from a detective. The identity theft was two auto loans that were defaulted on, and they figured out that it was made possible by a salesman at a shady car lot who was providing social security numbers to people who wouldn't qualify for a car loan. The guy had already moved on to parts unknown, but he had a record.
I hadn't expected anybody to do anything but file the report.
Here is a thing I don't think would happen today: the person who got the auto loans had the same first name as me (though spelled differently) and a different last name. When I asked the bank that had issued the loans why the different name hadn't struck them as a red flag, the person told me, "We figured you'd gotten married and changed your name." Amazing.
Eventually it was all resolved except that this person's name still shows up as one of my aliases on my credit reports. I gave up trying to get it resolved years ago, because I kept doing whatever the credit agencies told me to do, and it made no difference.
posted by Orlop at 9:57 AM on August 11, 2021 [9 favorites]
I had a car stolen out of my driveway a couple years back and reported it to the police only because I assumed if the car ever got dumped it would eventually find its way into the impound lot, and with a report I might be more likely to hear about it. Which is what happened a month later.
A friend of mine got a call from the police after his car had been in the impound lot for a week with a broken window in the rain.
posted by octothorpe at 10:03 AM on August 11, 2021 [2 favorites]
A friend of mine got a call from the police after his car had been in the impound lot for a week with a broken window in the rain.
posted by octothorpe at 10:03 AM on August 11, 2021 [2 favorites]
The question is, what does it mean to be a cop?It’s an interesting question, but the prevailing policy of giving the cops themselves wide latitude to answer it for themselves is clearly not working out. Whatever else we expect them to do, we have a whole profession of people with a legal monopoly on violence, and a serious problem with applying violent solutions to nonviolent problems and not meeting the additional nonviolent responsibilities we pile onto them very well at all.
I think and hope that it's possible to have the people whose job this is do it better rather than try to circumscribe their roles increasingly.We’ve all been thinking and hoping that for a very long time, and it’s just not happening with what we’re doing. Isn’t it just possible that the role has been defined badly from the start? This sort of defense of the status quo just sounds a lot to me like sunk cost fallacy. The big problem we aren’t addressing is that anybody who is authorized to use violence under color of the state should be kept on the shortest possible leash, and should definitely never be permitted to oversee themselves. Hoping for a better quality of enforcers to suddenly step up isn’t going to work. We can either circumscribe the role and, and the authority of those who are a little too eager to fill it, or we can radically redefine the role so as to circumscribe the violence it currently entails. If you want to give EMTs guns and call them cops, fine, so long as emergency medical care is their first responsibility.
Contrast with the current situation where friends of mine who have worked as EMTs have stories about being interfered with and threatened with arrest by cops on a scene because the EMT is, in the officer’s opinion, not being cruel enough (in sometimes life-threatening ways) to a suspect who is also a patient. The problem is a job, or a significant part of the job, where those doing it are not disabused of the idea that cruelty is the job. Arrange the deck chairs however you want. The culture of violence is the iceberg.
posted by gelfin at 10:29 AM on August 11, 2021 [24 favorites]
I was disappointed. When I saw the word 'scooter' I thought it would be something cool, like a Vespa or GS.
Yes Cardinal Fang it's confusing. Assumptions are often made here about what sort of scooter is being discussed, like in this recent thread, which I find a little exasperating.
posted by Rash at 10:32 AM on August 11, 2021
Yes Cardinal Fang it's confusing. Assumptions are often made here about what sort of scooter is being discussed, like in this recent thread, which I find a little exasperating.
posted by Rash at 10:32 AM on August 11, 2021
This is all in an extremely upper middle class / outright wealthy town where the police mostly spend their time harassing minorities driving through. This is why I find the defund debate confusing, because I can't understand how anyone can interact with police in most parts of the US and not come out of it thinking they're pointless.
They’re not pointless as such if the harassment of minority drivers is the service your neighbors have hired them to provide.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 10:50 AM on August 11, 2021 [6 favorites]
They’re not pointless as such if the harassment of minority drivers is the service your neighbors have hired them to provide.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 10:50 AM on August 11, 2021 [6 favorites]
I think and hope that it's possible to have the people whose job this is do it better rather than try to circumscribe their roles increasingly.
There are a lot of other functions of government and public service where this isn't really true, though, and it's not clear that the person coming to take your stolen property report IS in a potentially dangerous or life-threatening situation.
Part of the discourse around the role of police in society is questioning why we have people who are relatively well equipped (at least physically speaking) to deal with violent and dangerous crime handling everything to do with law enforcement, and even situations where no one has actually committed a crime, like welfare checks and mental health episodes. We don't send the same tax auditor who looks over a fraudulent account to arrest the perpetrator afterwards (or at least, not outside of a movie). Is it necessary to send the person with a gun to take a statement?
posted by chrominance at 11:53 AM on August 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
There are a lot of other functions of government and public service where this isn't really true, though, and it's not clear that the person coming to take your stolen property report IS in a potentially dangerous or life-threatening situation.
Part of the discourse around the role of police in society is questioning why we have people who are relatively well equipped (at least physically speaking) to deal with violent and dangerous crime handling everything to do with law enforcement, and even situations where no one has actually committed a crime, like welfare checks and mental health episodes. We don't send the same tax auditor who looks over a fraudulent account to arrest the perpetrator afterwards (or at least, not outside of a movie). Is it necessary to send the person with a gun to take a statement?
posted by chrominance at 11:53 AM on August 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
Part of the discourse around the role of police in society is questioning why we have people who are relatively well equipped (at least physically speaking) to deal with violent and dangerous crime handling everything
Well obviously, the question we should be answering is why we refuse to arm librarians. #2ndAmendment #hamburger
posted by pwnguin at 12:03 PM on August 11, 2021 [2 favorites]
Well obviously, the question we should be answering is why we refuse to arm librarians. #2ndAmendment #hamburger
posted by pwnguin at 12:03 PM on August 11, 2021 [2 favorites]
Every year, starting around Thanksgiving, packages have a habit of disappearing off our front porch after the FedEx truck drives away. Frequently it happens between the time the truck leaves and I get the delivery notification on my phone, which is to say, within about 90 seconds of delivery. This suggests someone is just following the delivery truck around. I've filed police reports about some of the bigger stuff that's been stolen, because otherwise the insurance claim won't pay. Those cases have been pursued with exactly the amount of vigor one might expect. I have half a mind to buy some sort of homebrew motion-sensitive camera so I can get video of the jerk stealing stuff, but then I read the NextDoor thread about a neighbor who took security camera footage (with a license plate number visible) to the cops and they STILL couldn't be bothered to do anything about it.
So good for you, Airtag dude. Next can you do a series on how to rig up an elaborate set of booby traps a la Home Alone, and then use the cops' utter incompetence/laziness as an affirmative defense for your own misdeeds?
posted by Mayor West at 12:06 PM on August 11, 2021 [3 favorites]
So good for you, Airtag dude. Next can you do a series on how to rig up an elaborate set of booby traps a la Home Alone, and then use the cops' utter incompetence/laziness as an affirmative defense for your own misdeeds?
posted by Mayor West at 12:06 PM on August 11, 2021 [3 favorites]
Someone broke into our house by using a ladder I had left out to access an upper-level window. They stole a bunch of small electronics and we called the police about it. They came, took a report of what was missing, dusted for fingerprints, and told us that we'd likely never get the stuff back. A couple of days later they called that they had caught the thieves and to come get our stuff. We didn't get everything back, and we actually got an extra Wiimote - I told them that it wasn't mine but they said that no one else had claimed it and it somewhat balanced things out. The thieves actually took some pictures on our camera, which apparently the police didn't check, so I burned it onto a CD and gave that to them afterwards.
Officers did come to my house one night to ask for footage from my doorbell camera as there had been a kidnapping and the vehicle was found in the area. I had some footage which I was able to share with them which I guess helped them flesh out their timeline.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:22 PM on August 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
Officers did come to my house one night to ask for footage from my doorbell camera as there had been a kidnapping and the vehicle was found in the area. I had some footage which I was able to share with them which I guess helped them flesh out their timeline.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:22 PM on August 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
I had a police officer "investigate" my car break-in over the phone. He said "here's the report number for your insurance" and hung up.
posted by octothorpe at 6:44 AM on August 11
seriously though i might pay money for this kind of lack of verbal abuse. glad he got to the point and gave you a number.
when i have reported petty theft, the cops, after the interview, have usually stated "ok, we will patrol [Black neighborhood on the other side of town not even remotely connected to anything] and keep an eye open" even when, i mean, i don't know what i did to signal to them that that kind of statement would be reassuring.
I would pay a fee to ensure that i am not inducing or justifying any armed, racist patrols on my way to make an insurance claim for a car stereo.
and n+1 on the stories about "my bike got stolen, my friend and i went to the place under the bridge where people live and we took it back, glad i didn't call the cops"
posted by eustatic at 12:54 PM on August 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 6:44 AM on August 11
seriously though i might pay money for this kind of lack of verbal abuse. glad he got to the point and gave you a number.
when i have reported petty theft, the cops, after the interview, have usually stated "ok, we will patrol [Black neighborhood on the other side of town not even remotely connected to anything] and keep an eye open" even when, i mean, i don't know what i did to signal to them that that kind of statement would be reassuring.
I would pay a fee to ensure that i am not inducing or justifying any armed, racist patrols on my way to make an insurance claim for a car stereo.
and n+1 on the stories about "my bike got stolen, my friend and i went to the place under the bridge where people live and we took it back, glad i didn't call the cops"
posted by eustatic at 12:54 PM on August 11, 2021 [4 favorites]
A few years ago, the guy who ran the village store put a notice in the Front Porch Forum saying something like 'I saw you take my bike. I have the license plate number. If you just bring back the bike, I will not report it.'
The bike came back the next day. I told him I really thought that was a great way to handle it, and he was lucky he had a security camera. He said, "Oh, I made that part up."
posted by MtDewd at 1:18 PM on August 11, 2021 [21 favorites]
The bike came back the next day. I told him I really thought that was a great way to handle it, and he was lucky he had a security camera. He said, "Oh, I made that part up."
posted by MtDewd at 1:18 PM on August 11, 2021 [21 favorites]
The guy is a good negotiator, by making the officers see the benefits of believing the technology, and MAY have found a potential fencing operation.
Cops generally LOVE proactive owners like this: they get the glory of filling out "successful recovery" reports without doing much work if at all. Most people who go to the cops generally have almost NOTHING to go on and/or expect miracles. I guess the two that got a bit interested are at least more tech aware than their older colleagues.
posted by kschang at 3:50 PM on August 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
Cops generally LOVE proactive owners like this: they get the glory of filling out "successful recovery" reports without doing much work if at all. Most people who go to the cops generally have almost NOTHING to go on and/or expect miracles. I guess the two that got a bit interested are at least more tech aware than their older colleagues.
posted by kschang at 3:50 PM on August 11, 2021 [1 favorite]
Cops generally LOVE proactive owners like this: they get the glory of filling out "successful recovery" reports without doing much work if at all. Most people who go to the cops generally have almost NOTHING to go on and/or expect miracles. I guess the two that got a bit interested are at least more tech aware than their older colleagues.It depends a bunch on the individual officer as well. I live in a small town and have worked remotely from here for a bit more than 10 years. Every so often, though, there's a reason to get together face to face with my colleagues, which usually happened down in California.
Because I have a family member in the area that I don't see very often, I would sometimes stay at her home rather than book a hotel. On one of these trips, her home was burglarized while I was at a meeting and she was at her small business. Small, high-value items were most of what was taken, and among the items that were stolen from my travel gear were an iPod Touch and a small mirrorless camera.
The next day one of my colleagues pinged me on our workplace chat to ask why I was deleting all of the shared meetings from our workplace calendaring system. I wasn't, but quickly figured out that whoever had my stolen iPod Touch was clearing information from it manually rather than simply performing a factory reset. We're a small organization and all techies and so, after revoking my calendar credentials, we grabbed the access logs for our calendaring server and identified the IP address from which the deletions were being sent.
Reverse lookup on the IP address suggested it was part of a block of addresses belonging to Comcast and used (or so the DNS name suggested) for residential customers in Hayward, CA, which was close to where the items had been stolen. It wasn't ironclad but it seemed like a likely pointer to the culprit.
I was a little irked by the theft and it seemed like a solid clue pointing towards someone who, if not the actual thief, was probably the receiver of my stolen property, so I decided to make it as simple as possible for the police to follow the trail. Knowing they wouldn't (realistically, in Hayward probably couldn't) devote any significant manpower to following up, I contacted people I knew at Comcast to ask what their process was for producing subscriber records in response to law enforcement requests, and basically did as much as I could to make it easy for the officer handling the case -- essentially I got the forms, found all the information required to populate them, and gave them a packet that was essentially 95% filled-out records request for the ISP, and then I attached a note saying "if you sign this and fax it to this phone number, someone will provide you with the address where my stolen items were last known to be. If you find them you can positively identify (stolen iPod) because its serial number was (number) [it turns out this info is used by iTunes to distinguish between devices you are syncing], and you can identify (stolen camera) because it is (make and model) and has this distinguishing damage.."
And then, alas, I got nothing for six months. Eventually, however, the officer who had been assigned to my case got promoted and his incoming replacement, flipping through the list of open cases they had inherited, looked at my note, said "well that seems simple enough" and faxed in the records request. They used the specific descriptions I had given and the records produced by the ISP to get a search warrant, and when I heard back from them afterwards they had found electronics and other stolen items on the premises that they were able to link to more than a dozen other theft reports.
None of which would ever have happened, presumably, had the first officer assigned to the case not been promoted to ignoring more important crimes. But hey, at least I got the camera back, probably because the crack in the screen on the back made it difficult to sell. The iPod Touch was never recovered - it had been in good condition and was probably resold quickly.
posted by Nerd of the North at 5:43 PM on August 11, 2021 [10 favorites]
Yeah, they're not gonna find your Creedence tape, they're just as suspicious of the victim as the crimer. Do the minimum necessary to make your insurance happy.
That's been my experience. I had to report my wallet stolen after an studio wrap party that someone decided to hold in a local dive bar. I made it clear the credit card company asked me to report the theft. The cop decided to stretch the phone call out with, “well, what were you DOING in that bar?”
posted by bonobothegreat at 7:22 PM on August 11, 2021 [2 favorites]
That's been my experience. I had to report my wallet stolen after an studio wrap party that someone decided to hold in a local dive bar. I made it clear the credit card company asked me to report the theft. The cop decided to stretch the phone call out with, “well, what were you DOING in that bar?”
posted by bonobothegreat at 7:22 PM on August 11, 2021 [2 favorites]
I'm glad he got his scooter back and was OK with hanging on to it.
I had a car stolen once and even when it was returned the theft made me feel so violated that I sold it as soon as I possibly could. The police only got back to me when they found my car.
posted by bendy at 12:24 AM on August 12, 2021 [2 favorites]
I had a car stolen once and even when it was returned the theft made me feel so violated that I sold it as soon as I possibly could. The police only got back to me when they found my car.
posted by bendy at 12:24 AM on August 12, 2021 [2 favorites]
I got my head bashed into the ground repeatedly by a transient last spring. I found the guy several months later. Followed him for an hour until the police arrived. They let him go. I asked if they had pulled the security tapes that showed it happening. They said no, that would require a subpoena. Asked if they would show his picture to any one of the half dozen witnesses. They said no because people don't pick up the phone when they call. Oh well. I still see the guy in my neighborhood from time to time.
posted by nestor_makhno at 6:47 AM on August 12, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by nestor_makhno at 6:47 AM on August 12, 2021 [3 favorites]
My local police department is required to publish a variety of annual statistics, and they make their reports available online. It provides some interesting (at least to me) insight into what a suburban police department actually does:
In 2019: out of 491,700 "calls for service" (which can either be publicly- or officer-initiated, the breakdown is not given), 64,242 were "criminal" calls, a category that covers most of the stuff you'd kind of expect police to be doing, from Bomb threat through Simple assault to Weapon discharge. 223,181 were classified as "service" calls, an apparent second tier which contains alarm investigations, Domestic dispute, missing persons, Overdose, suicide threats and attempts, anything "suspicious" (noises, persons, vehicles), all the way to Weapons of Mass Destruction responses. The remaining 204,277 were for "traffic" calls, which covers mostly what you'd expect: Accident response, traffic and speeding violations, the all-important Hazard in Roadway, and the intriguingly named Inoperative Vehicle on Private Property.
With some exceptions, most of the categories included in the second and third tiers could be handled by someone other than the police. In some cases this might involve empowering other types of emergency responders, such as Ambulance/EMS, Animal Control, or Fire departments, or creating a 24/7 on-call and responding version of mental health or conflict resolution services. Lots of non-accident traffic calls could be handled by Public Works. Speeding tickets in many countries are just sent in the mail.
That said, I don't think the slogan "defund the police" is doing anyone any favors, at least in my neck of the woods. When people think of the police, I think they tend to think of those first-tier calls, even though they only represent about 13% of total call volume. That so many police calls are for what seem to be non-policing matters isn't well understood, I don't think.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:06 AM on August 12, 2021 [2 favorites]
In 2019: out of 491,700 "calls for service" (which can either be publicly- or officer-initiated, the breakdown is not given), 64,242 were "criminal" calls, a category that covers most of the stuff you'd kind of expect police to be doing, from Bomb threat through Simple assault to Weapon discharge. 223,181 were classified as "service" calls, an apparent second tier which contains alarm investigations, Domestic dispute, missing persons, Overdose, suicide threats and attempts, anything "suspicious" (noises, persons, vehicles), all the way to Weapons of Mass Destruction responses. The remaining 204,277 were for "traffic" calls, which covers mostly what you'd expect: Accident response, traffic and speeding violations, the all-important Hazard in Roadway, and the intriguingly named Inoperative Vehicle on Private Property.
With some exceptions, most of the categories included in the second and third tiers could be handled by someone other than the police. In some cases this might involve empowering other types of emergency responders, such as Ambulance/EMS, Animal Control, or Fire departments, or creating a 24/7 on-call and responding version of mental health or conflict resolution services. Lots of non-accident traffic calls could be handled by Public Works. Speeding tickets in many countries are just sent in the mail.
That said, I don't think the slogan "defund the police" is doing anyone any favors, at least in my neck of the woods. When people think of the police, I think they tend to think of those first-tier calls, even though they only represent about 13% of total call volume. That so many police calls are for what seem to be non-policing matters isn't well understood, I don't think.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:06 AM on August 12, 2021 [2 favorites]
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Uh he just sorta moves on from this part of the story which is kind of terrifying...
posted by synecdoche at 3:46 AM on August 11, 2021 [15 favorites]