View from the cop: Crime & punishment
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AJC.com > Metro > View from the cop > Archives > 2008 > May > 13
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Dumb thieves and other random musings
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Today I thought I would just throw out some random thoughts.
I’ve noticed two commercials that are continuously playing on radio. Collection agencies are advertising more than ever before: “We only charge you for the money we collect.”
What a deal. Sign of the times I guess. Are we in a recession or a semi-recession, sort of recession? Gas prices are hitting close to four-bucks and yet the oil companies are having record profits?
We used to have tons of gas drive-offs until the stations all required people to pay up front unless they used a card. More and more of our credit card thefts have gas purchases put on them just after the theft. Priorities are changing. Crooks now want to gas up before they use the stolen card anywhere else.
Some gas stations have gas-pump cameras, something I think is great. We can now capture the painful look on people as they read the pump’s dollar amount go up and up.
Something else hot on the list of thieves is copper.
AC units and copper wire, already buried in some cases, are dug up and stolen. In some thefts, it appears that the thieves were well prepared and willing to spend a lot of time pulling up buried copper lines. OK, copper prices were at $8,430 a ton. OK, a ton is 2,000 pounds.
So that means a little over four-bucks a pound? To show you how far people attempt to go, a 21-year old man from West Virginia was electrocuted as he tried to steal copper wires from a power line. I saw the pictures of this dude. Let me tell you, he was cooked! He was however, still wearing his rubber gloves. Thinning of the herd I guess. He’ll probably make the final cut of this year’s Darwin Awards.
Well folks, your Garmin GPS units are going for a grand total of forty-bucks on the stolen GPS market.
Forty bucks is a lot to a crack head. Right now they’re still picking them off in public parking lots. Again, a scientific study reveals the following: If you take them out of the car, the bad people will not steal it. Wait, there’s more: if you take the GPS out of the car, don’t forget to take the little suction cup thingie too.
No sense tempting some crack-commando to smash and take a look-see. Now, take that, and add this: keep some Kleenex in the car and wipe the little round suction-cup mark the cup leaves on the windshield. Now there is absolutely NO evidence and remember, the bad people SEE what they want first, and then they break your windows and go in. Now, that is three things that you can do to put you in the upper five-percentile of people who are not too lazy to—uh, do what I just said—yep, that.
If you don’t have time for that and you do get something stolen—well, what did you learn? It’s never a priority until it gets stolen. Then you are one upset dude right? But out of all that anger, the one thing you won’t say, at least publicly, is: “Well I wish I had taken the time to take those things out of the car.”
We’re all victims of laziness aren’t we? Let’s face it. With large HD televisions and recliners and video games and…well, all you need is a catheter and you can park it there for days. Just take an extra minute or so and don’t give the crack heads the opportunity to steal your stuff.
Oh yes, here is the other radio commercial I’ve been hearing.
The train people are doing commercials now urging people not to cross the railroad tracks while the trains are moving at a high rate of speed towards them. They went as far to describe the train as six-hundred tons that can hit you and obviously hurt you. It takes the distance of six football fields to stop. That sounds more dramatic than saying six-hundred yards.
Why did they have to put together a commercial to explain to us that trains can kill us if they run over us? I thought that was understood. If you or anyone in your family have any doubts as to the overwhelming advantage a train has to your car, rent the 1974 movie called “Dirty Mary-Crazy Larry” starring Peter Fonda and Susan George.
Aside from the entertainment value of all that bad acting, the final scene should serve as a good visual that trains will mess you up. Crazy Larry and Dirty Mary bite the dust. Again though, why do they have to reminded us of something so obvious? If this is a problem then lets do what we did with explaining the birds and the bees. Let the schools do it for us.
Here’s a paragraph from “A Parent Talks to Children Ages 12-13.” Little Laura is curious about Harvey after she saw him skinny-dipping in old man Wheeler’s pond. “Gee,” she said to herself, “Harvey is different than me.” Later, she asked her mom why Harvey was different—you know, down there, that her. “Well,” said her mother, “You see, boys are made different than girls. It’s all part of the plan to, well, you know, make babies and keep the population going. Also, stay away from trains.” Piece of cake.
