Posted on 12/26/2007 8:55:14 PM PST by hole_n_one
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
The bait was tempting: a nondescript, unlocked rental car, parked in the lots of busy shopping centers in Thousand Oaks at the height of the holiday shopping season, with high-end electronics left in plain sight.
For three days the Ventura County Sheriff's Department watched and waited.
No one took the bait.
"We really expected sometime in the three days we would have one or more people we would be arresting," Senior Officer Eric Buschow, a detective and spokesman with the Sheriff's Department, said Monday. "There were people that looked really hard, lingered around like they were contemplating taking things but didn't."
Instead, what officers found in their sting operation was no shortage of good Samaritans who locked the car, shut the trunk or in one case went into the store to have someone call the police.
"If we weren't trying to do this covertly, I would have gone up and thanked people," Buschow said. "It's great they got involved and cared enough to do that."
The sting took place Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of last week. This time of the year, thefts from unlocked vehicles increase and have been a problem throughout Ventura County. Thousand Oaks saw a spike in these types of crimes last fall.
On the first day of the sting, Buschow said he had to unlock the car multiple times, thanks to the good deeds of others.
Previous stings have resulted in the arrests of thieves.
It wasn't like police weren't trying to make it as enticing as possible: They left the car's trunk open and car windows down at times. The vehicle was left outside of Best Buy on Moorpark Road, the Janss Marketplace and The Oaks mall.
The stuff left in the car was worth enough to trigger a felony charge if anyone took the bait.
Buschow says the unsuccessful sting illustrates the majority of people would not take advantage of the opportunity to create crime. Timing and luck also had a role.
"Pinpointing that spot and dangling that carrot in front of the small population that would do it is hard," Buschow said. "There is a certain amount of luck in this."
Cars are broken into frequently, especially when items such as cell phones, portable GPS systems and MP3 players are inside. Recently, a resident had two laptops stolen from his vehicle.
"This is going on in all communities," Buschow said. "We don't have the corner on this market. There is an opportunistic population out there and they are doing very well."
Twenty-five years ago, in the summer of 1983, I was working as the midnight hostler in the Croton-Harmon shops of Metro-North (the commuter railroad that runs north and east from Grand Central Terminal in New York). A hostler moves the cars around as needed, and back then working midnights was all I could get, so I took it.
One night, walking through the cars, I noticed a wallet on one of the seats. I picked it up and turned it in at the office. Didn't even bother to open it and look inside.
Turns out it belonged to one of the producers of CBS' "60 Minutes". Got a nice letter out of that one. Still have that letter someplace, I think.
- John
Damn! You had a chance of making a conservative out of him! jk. Too bad people even think about taking things that are not theirs.
It would be one thing for property to be easily accessible if someone wanted to steal it and they went ahead and took it. It would be another of there was an undercover officer nearby who made statements like "Take it and I'll split the good with you. Go ahead. No one is around. I'll watch for you." Or something similar to get the person to agree to commit an act that they wouldn't normally do.
As best as I can determine, the points made by Titus are essentially that he doesn't like sting operations, so the police shouldn't do them.
This particular operation might not have yielded any arrests so they might not run it in the same area for a while. Manpower deployment and budgets are not things that Management likes to squander if the results are not positive. That doesn't mean that they won't run it again in the future if circumstances warrant it. Especially around Christmas!
I wonder what would happen if a citizen left a large box of donuts in plain view in an unlocked car outside a police station?
In most areas of the country, the donuts would spoil because the police wouldn't touch them. You might contact NBC and suggest that they do a sting operation.
If I were an officer and I saw a bunch of donuts in an unlocked car I wouldn't touch them for two reasons:
1. They're not mine.
2. They might be adulterated.
In other words, the police are smart enough to recognize their own tactics.
That’s one way to look at it. Another way is that the police are reflective of most of the population and don’t take things that aren’t theirs.
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