View from the cop: Crime & punishment
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AJC.com > Metro > View from the cop > Archives > 2008 > November > 25 > Entry
Crime & punishment
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
People Who Make Us Look Normal
A restaurant employee said a man came into the restaurant on Mount Vernon Highway and sat down at a table designated for more than one person. The employee asked the man to please move to a smaller table, which he did.
The man ordered a couple of beers, a hamburger, a sundae, and a brandy. When it came time for the check, the server gave him the bill. The man then drew, with blue ink and a green crayon, a sixty-dollar bill. He then gave the just-made sixty-dollar bill to the server—and then asked for change. The server told the man he required actual money. The man then got up and ran out of the restaurant.
Robbery
A man reported that he stopped to pick up a hitchhiker (clue) around 8 p.m. The hitchhiker pulled a gun and forced the victim to drive to his bank and withdraw about $80 from the ATM. He then drove the man to Roswell and let him off at a service station near Holcomb Bridge Road.
One of the oldest and best pieces of advice you got when you started driving was “Never pick up a hitchhiker.” This is why.
Burglary
An apartment leasing manager reported someone stole a 42-inch television from the leasing office on Glenridge Drive. The side door to the office had been forced open.
The complainant said someone entered the home in the 700 block of Brook Park Place through a side-garage window, and then entered the kitchen. They took several appliances from the home and loaded them in a truck that they apparently backed up into or near the garage area.
Someone forced a window open and entered the victim’s apartment in the 8000 block of Roswell Road. The victim said a Playstation 3 video game system and two games were missing.
The victim’s front door was forced open. He found that two televisions were taken from the home on North Chambord Drive as well a laptop and printer. He also discovered they took his motorcycle.
Fraud, Forgery, and I.D. Theft
A man reported that someone went into his locker at the gym on Mt. Vernon Highway and took his keys. They went outside, found his car (alarm function) and then took his wallet and credit cards. They used the cards a short time later about three miles away at a retail store.
Although it’s a good point to leave your wallet out of the gym locker, these key thefts do occur occasionally. Even if you leave it in the car, find a good hiding spot where it would take a while to find it. For that matter, there’s a dozen places in your car you could hide small items like a credit card, where it would be extremely hard and time consuming to find them. Be creative.
Another option is to take the cards out and stash them in your pocket of your gym shorts. Buy the fancy gym shorts with the Velcro flat. I don’t know what you’re going to do in the shower (I’m not going there) but keep you eyes on those cards as much as you can.
Scam
We see this one just about monthly now.
A woman reported that she met a man while at a gas station on Roswell Road. The man asked for her phone number, which she gave him. They later went out. The man, who identified himself as the owner of a security company, said he had two out-of-town checks, each for $3,000. (clue)
He asked her to deposit the two checks and for her trouble, she could keep $700 from each. She did, and kept the $700 and gave him the rest. Soon, he asked her to do the same with a couple of $2.000 checks, which she did and kept the balance. The bank then contacted her and said the checks were fraudulent and did not clear. She called the man who told her that he would pay her back but later, he quit answering the phone. She’s out $4,430.
This is going on more and more. Large amount checks and the person telling you to keep a percentage is your clue this is a scam. Don’t fall for it.
Services »
Comments
By Can
November 25, 2008 5:23 PM | Link to this
My 90 year old mother was approached by two men and a woman in a doctor’s building hallway in Roswell Road area. The woman sat beside my mother on a bench and was on the phone the whole time. The two men appeared when the woman advised them by phone the coast was clear. One of the men diverted my mother’s attention by advising her she had a spider in her hair. The other two grabbed her billfold out of her purse. The three immediately left. Before my mother could call her credit card companies they were able to get $2500 in cash from a bank credit card even thought the teller thought the blond woman looked a lot younger than a 90 year old woman. This group was able to charge $1000 at two major stores and there would have been more charges except for very alert employees who called the credit card companies. This area is an active target area for thieves. Be careful, always be alert, and protect yourself and the elderly.
By Regina
November 25, 2008 8:11 PM | Link to this
Can, I pray those thieves get caught soon. They are low and you can’t imagine what I think of them. Your mom can’t even go to the doctor without being a target. That is probably their MO and target the elderly. People need to notice people loitering but so many people are too consumed by their own lives to even notice.
My Honda Accord was stolen in August. This place is thick with thieves. I am extremely cautious and anything suspicious, I report to the police. The police told me that car thieves are targeting neighborhoods and avoiding more public areas because neighborhoods don’t have cameras.
The suburbs are attracting more and more criminals.
By reader
November 25, 2008 8:20 PM | Link to this
With Christmas just around the corner, you might think you’d be safer shopping from home, but no. A package, a gift, (an expensive game system) that was delivered to a neighbor’s house was stolen. It only takes a minute. You just never know who is watching. Same thing happened last year to another neighbor. So, is it the neighbors? Their rotten kids? Or someone following the UPS guy?
By Texas Pete
November 25, 2008 9:08 PM | Link to this
I caught a young punk that broke into my house a few years ago. After beating the crap out of him, I took him down to the Okefenokee Swamp and let the gators have him. God justice is wonderful. I wonder if his mother misses him?
By Regina
November 25, 2008 11:56 PM | Link to this
Texas Pete,
Good idea. The community should give them a sound thrashing…Is it Singapore where they cane thieves?
Reader, The neighborhood watch programs need to be vigilant. It is getting ridiculous. Parents know when their kids come home with expensive items and no means to pay for them that they are stolen.
By Turbot
November 26, 2008 6:33 AM | Link to this
There is a company selling magazines by phone. If you dont hang up immediately, the presume you want their magazines, and they somehow get your bank account #, probably by using a Cheney-copyrighted hacking method, or simply by waterboarding your spouse, and then they proceed to charge 33 bucks for magazines you didn’t order. You cant stop them. You can only move to another state or country and change your financial barter method from fiat money to salt, gold, or free government cheese.
Do not buy magazines from nobody, no how, no way, uh uh, dont do it. Not. Stop. I cant get rid of these clowns. They’ve hit me five times for 33 buck in the past week. I went to the bank and they say, “Huh? We dont know nuthing bout no debits or credits. We need a bailout. Get lost, you stink. Buy me lunch?”
I guess the bailout didn’t work, eh? BTW: These bailouts are inflationary. Expect 18-25 percent inflation in 2009. The markets? You decide. Hint: Short.
What we are witnessing is the death of capitalism, whose ideology, conservatism, died last year. Capitalism doesn’t work without corruption. It just doesn’t. It needs war too, which should be a clue as to why it’s dying. Capitalism needs a stooge, a fallguy, which used to be third world countries. Imperialism was great for capitalism. Now, when the fall guy is the bank CEO’s and Wallstreet big shots, capitalism pays itself off with a bailout, like capitalism’s own retirement plan. Take the money and flee the country. Leave John Doe holding the big bag of sheet.
This is a new era, the Broke Era. Cheney’s cronies pirated every last red cent this country had, and they’ll be as unavailable as the magazine customer service people are when you want to cancel your subscriptions.
Expect Blackwater mercenaries to patrol our streets and guard the gated communities. Expect shots heard round the world. Expect collateral damage, Cheney style.
Welcome to the brave new middle ages.
By Lori
November 26, 2008 8:39 AM | Link to this
Turbot, are you on drugs?
By wooooo
November 26, 2008 9:47 AM | Link to this
I agree Turbot. My dog came home from work the other day and had a Haliburton collar on. I asked him, “what up wit dat?” He licked himself and then tricked me into buying a perscription to Cosmo.
By NO ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS LEFT BEHIND
November 26, 2008 10:51 AM | Link to this
MOTHERS AGAINST SAXBY CHAMBLISS……….Send the criminal illegals back to their country.
By Jim
November 26, 2008 10:52 AM | Link to this
They’re wrong..neighborhoods DO have camera’s. At least mine does. Our home was vandalized a year ago, so I went in search of cameras. I found that you can get a video adapter that just plugs into a USB port and will allow you to hook up four cameras for under a hundred bucks. The included software records all four cameras at full frame, full resolution, and includes timed record, motion sensor (if there is movement in the video frame, it starts recording) and even alarm recording.
That, and four cameras for about sixty bucks each, and nothing happens around here without my knowing about it.
We actually caught a mail thief recently-a neighbor reported some checks stolen, I went back and looked at the recording, and got the license number of the car as it stopped at the mailbox.
Best $350 I ever spent!
By Jim
November 26, 2008 10:57 AM | Link to this
They’re wrong..neighborhoods DO have camera’s. At least mine does. Our home was vandalized a year ago, so I went in search of cameras. I found that you can get a video adapter that just plugs into a USB port and will allow you to hook up four cameras for under a hundred bucks. The included software records all four cameras at full frame, full resolution, and includes timed record, motion sensor (if there is movement in the video frame, it starts recording) and even alarm recording.
That, and four cameras for about sixty bucks each, and nothing happens around here without my knowing about it.
We actually caught a mail thief recently-a neighbor reported some checks stolen, I went back and looked at the recording, and got the license number of the car as it stopped at the mailbox.
Best $350 I ever spent!
By Turbot
November 26, 2008 12:24 PM | Link to this
Glad you all liked the material. Feel free to steal, then folks’ll think that YOU’RE the genius, instead of the genital wart remedy you truly are.
By mikeslilhoney
November 26, 2008 1:19 PM | Link to this
Turbot honey get back on your meds! Happy Thanksgiving!
By Trizzle
November 26, 2008 1:41 PM | Link to this
you know, most of the time i read these blogs, all I can manage to say is “wow”.
By Regina
November 26, 2008 2:41 PM | Link to this
Jim, can you post a link where I can get the equipment? Thank you!
By Dixie
November 26, 2008 3:08 PM | Link to this
Disambiguation - Are you a Leo?
By reader
November 26, 2008 4:05 PM | Link to this
Jim: Do those cameras have clear images at night, too?
By Sticky fingers
November 26, 2008 4:13 PM | Link to this
My friends and I like to do our Christmas shopping at Thanksgiving. So many people travel leaving behind unoccupied houses with lots of goodies for us. Thank God for plasma screed TVs and laptop computers - we can carry so many more goodies than ever before.
I maybe seeing you soon
By Turbot
November 26, 2008 5:47 PM | Link to this
Hey jim, you spent all that dough just to find out which kid was stealing your newspaper? Are you Bob Dole? I voted for you, sir. I’m a conservative…that is I was a conservative until I realized I wasn’t gay, and now I’m a liberal, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Hope you find that your wife is not doing the UPS man and have the most enticing camera angles to prove it. (Whoa).
Is this clown in for a shock or what?
Sticky Fingers: You exhibit a complete lack of respect for the law. I am making a formal sheetizen’s arrest. You have the right to remain a moron. What you blog can and will keep your hands from fondling yourself. You have the right to blow an attourney.
moron.
By bj
November 26, 2008 10:01 PM | Link to this
It’s a shame we can’t pick up hitchhikers anymore. In my late teens and early twenties, that’s the only way I could get around, but I’m still grateful to those who helped me get from military bases, some as far away as St. Louis, to my home in Georgia and back. I was able to spend my leaves with family and friends. I tried to be as considerate as my benefactors when I was able to buy a car. But I stopped picking up hitchhikers when my first child was born, back in ‘67. (Sigh)
By Long Haul Trucker
November 26, 2008 10:34 PM | Link to this
I used to pick up hitch hikers in the late 70s through the 80s. I would usually dope them up and sell them to pimps across the country. Now you have to tranquilize them and sell them to the dog fighting rings as human targets.
By Fred
November 26, 2008 11:55 PM | Link to this
Tough decision to make. Who was funnier (more funny for you grammarnazi’s)? Turbot or wooo. Turbot did a nice piece, but woo may have upstaged him with the Haliburton/dog story. Wooo was also more brief which tends to make the BCS voters more comfortable………
By Fred
November 26, 2008 11:56 PM | Link to this
Oh, and BTW Turbot? Are you a veteran from the Turbot wars?
By LoFlyer
November 27, 2008 12:07 AM | Link to this
Turbot, you ignorant slut……
By Big O
November 27, 2008 12:10 AM | Link to this
Sandy Springs PD all graduated with honors from Barney Fife Univ. I get a real kick out of watching them in action. Breaking open a box of Krispy Kremes.
By SS Resident
November 27, 2008 1:29 AM | Link to this
Lt. Rose thanks for stopping by last year. Sorry I called you Sgt. at the time, not knowing you were promoted. Our neighborhood on Glenridge now has top of the line commercial cameras that transmit off site. Even if someone tries to steal or vandalize the cameras, we will have the video. Every vehicle that even comes near us is on video, coming and going, and they’ll never know it.
By Turbot
November 27, 2008 6:59 AM | Link to this
Woo is a very funny blogger.
By "Spank" the monkey
November 27, 2008 11:50 AM | Link to this
Turbot is the same idiot that posts under a hundred different names on this blog. Same crap, different name, different suckers thinking he’s someone new.
By Spunk the Funk
November 27, 2008 1:06 PM | Link to this
Well.
By judyg
November 27, 2008 3:20 PM | Link to this
Turbot may have been trying to be funny, but he/she is pretty dead on about the economy. Those bailouts are only prolonging and making worse that brakeless freight train headed our way.
Enjoy your holidays. Next year’s may not be this good.
By Yule Fool
November 28, 2008 8:31 AM | Link to this
Problem with capitalism: It creates one millionaire for every 100 slaves. What I am proposing is a new economic paradigm for our country and the world. Not capitalism. Not Communism. But Cap-a-Commie-ism.
Yes, Cap-a-Commie-ism, where everyone is broke, armed, and bitter, (you know, like we are now), and when some big shot manages to make a million at everyone else’s expense, you pop a cap in his commieass, (or tax his million away so he donts be a gittin’ no more than he shoulds be a gittin’).
That doesn’t make sense, yet somehow… It….could…..WORK!
Ah, it’s gonna be great, folks, with our new economic paradigm, we’ll once again join our hands across america and buy the world a coke, yes, as one country again, we’ll walk that walk, and talk that talk, do the mash potatoe, together, as one big broke bunch of losers. (Just like we are now.) Seriously, cant you see that the USA’s economic model failed? We are too easily robbed. This bailout is the best example. They keep changing the justification for it, and still dont know how to spend it, and yet, the big shots are grinning from ear to ear. It doesn’t take a lip reader, or a body language translator, or a mind reader, or a mime-research-scientist to know that we got took with our eyes wide open. They actually claimed that the sky would fall if we didn’t bailout wallstreet and the banks. And we fell for it. Remember, at the end of “the boy who cried wolf”, the boy got eaten by the wolf…and THAT is what I’m proposing for the Bush Administration….no, better yet, at the end of “the pied piper”, when the townsfolks refused to pay him, he entranced the little children into marching single file into a volcano filled with MAGMA, and THAT is what I’m proposing for the, no that’s Scientology……okay, I’ve got it: At the end of Hanzel and Gretel the witch is tricked into the oven which she herself set at 550 degrees farfenugen, I mean gesundheit, I mean farenheit…….
By clean up sandy springs
November 28, 2008 9:01 AM | Link to this
Sandy Springs has become a drug infested, homeless magnet, and a bottom of the barrel community. On on side of the road the homes are worth multi-millions, on the others, the apartments are grossly outdated and grossly overpopulated with too many people living in some of the apartments. We were very fortunate to get out of Sandy Springs after a murder in the complex we lived in; the murder was brushed off like no big deal. The kids in the area that have no manners or respect for themselves let alone anyone else have ruined the area. The day laborers who intimidate passer bys at the gas stations, the drug dealers who rum rampant, and the nastiness of certain parts of the area have made Sandy Springs a MOST UNPLEASANT place. It is not safe, not clean, and not what the” City of Sandy Springs” was supposed to be like. Gut some of the apartments, and get the rif raf out, and now that the Sandy Springs police department seems (and I use that term carefully) to have been cleaned up, maybe now the focus can turn to making Sandy Springs a liveable place. Make it liveable, and the rest will come.
By clean up sandy springs
November 28, 2008 9:03 AM | Link to this
Sandy Springs has become a drug infested, homeless magnet, and a bottom of the barrel community. On on side of the road the homes are worth multi-millions, on the others, the apartments are grossly outdated and grossly overpopulated with too many people living in some of the apartments. We were very fortunate to get out of Sandy Springs after a murder in the complex we lived in; the murder was brushed off like no big deal. The kids in the area that have no manners or respect for themselves let alone anyone else have ruined the area. The day laborers who intimidate passer bys at the gas stations, the drug dealers who rum rampant, and the nastiness of certain parts of the area have made Sandy Springs a MOST UNPLEASANT place. It is not safe, not clean, and not what the” City of Sandy Springs” was supposed to be like. Gut some of the apartments, and get the rif raf out, and now that the Sandy Springs police department seems (and I use that term carefully) to have been cleaned up, maybe now the focus can turn to making Sandy Springs a liveable place. Make it liveable, and the rest will come.
By Penurious
November 28, 2008 9:54 AM | Link to this
SO what clean up is saying is that the people he sees in Sandy Springs exhibit a complete and total lack of respect for the law?
I think, sir, you’ll find that Officer Rose agrees with you and that’s why he’s out there 24/7 365 arresting these people and then making fun of them on his blog so that they suffer not only the agony and injury but the insult, while the rest of us roll on the floor laughing our A’s off slapping our knees with milk coming out of our noses, (ROTFLOAOSSOKWMCOOON!)
Just hope you’re not one of the curious visitors taking the five dollar tour when the inmates at the Atlanta Pen riot over the latest quick-cut from Officer Steve Rose.
JKLOL
By i concur
November 28, 2008 2:40 PM | Link to this
Clean up Sandy Springs is 100% accurate. My kids lived in an apartment there right on Roswell Road- after a murder, numerous break ins, several drug deals, and car jacking and broken windows on cars and in the apartments, leases were BROKEN to get my kids outta there. What an unsavory place; my kids neighbors who were drug dealers run the apartment complex; music all hours of the day and night, and a MURDER that was also brushed off like “oh well” - I blame the apartment communities for not doing a better background check; my kids downstairs neighbors had a two bedroom with 14 people living in it; COME ON. The mighty dollar speaks volumes; so does the eviction rate on Roswell Road. It is not the nice community it COULD be.
By "Spank" the monkey
November 29, 2008 7:09 AM | Link to this
Penurious is the same idiot that posts under a hundred different names on this blog. Same crap, different name, different suckers thinking he’s someone new.
By Fred
November 30, 2008 5:04 PM | Link to this
Dear Monkey Spanker: We know. “Turbot” does not even try to disguise the fact. It is a revelation only to YOU apparently when he uses a different name as you feel compelled to exhibit your Barney Fife deductive skills and “out him.” No one thinks he is “new” except for you. Oh, and we know who you are as well under YOUR many assumed names, right Mr. Pot (as in always trying to out Mr. Kettle, not as a Stoned reference or anything……..).
By ATC
December 8, 2008 9:30 AM | Link to this
Please come back. We miss you.
By Stone
December 8, 2008 3:50 PM | Link to this
OK…um…I’m back.
By ATC
December 12, 2008 2:54 PM | Link to this
Sorry, I was talking to Steve