We may have more on this subject coming up here later this week, but I read the article in the Statesman over the weekend on the “bait car” that snagged an Austin couple for Burglary of a Vehicle. This article stuck out to me personally for two reasons:

1. It happened a block away from the house I moved out of last week. The green house in the photo? My dog’s peed in that yard three hundred times.

2. Some &$% broke into my car on Saturday and stole my stereo.

Even recognizing firsthand that breaking into cars is a very bad thing that has a frustrating impact on normal, hardworking people who just want to be able to listen to Prince as they drive to work, and being fully aware of the dynamics of the neighborhood in which the bait car was placed, I’m against the practice.

It reminds me a little bit of the NYC subway sting operation from a year or so back, “Operation Lucky Bag”, where the police were leaving briefcases and shopping bags and wallets on the ground, waiting for someone to pick them up, and then arresting them. The problem is that doing these things doesn’t necessarily get you wallet thieves (or car burglars) – at worst, it gets you people whose decision-making skills are weak when faced with an uncommon temptation (like a wallet with a bunch of cash and no ID or a car with the keys sitting in the ignition) and, as in the case of the couple from my neighborhood and several people in New York, it often snags people who were trying to do the right thing.

But even leaving those people out – maybe they’re just outliers and most of the people who pick up the wallet or check out the car are really doing so with bad intentions – it still doesn't seem like a good way to go about things. Because the person who broke into my car was a pro - he left the house that evening with a toolkit that would enable him to get into my locked car, pop open the dashboard, cut the cables, and yank out my stereo. And that's the sort of person I'd like to see the police focus on. It makes me question their motives, if they need to manufacture a set of circumstances that make committing a crime unusually convenient - are they really interested in reducing theft or in generating arrests? It seems like a bait car that just had a decent system in it would be more inclined catch the sort of people who go out of their way to commit crimes, as opposed to catching people who might, for a variety of motives - some of which are non-malicious - end up breaking the law when confronted with a strange set of circumstances. In that scenario, the car might be parked for weeks (or, in the case of my stereo and the house I just moved into, two days) before anyone is actually busted in the sting, which would probably make it hard to justify the expense of parking a car full of monitoring equipment and tracking what happens to it.

And if no one was breaking into cars that didn't have the keys in the ignition, maybe I'd see the point. But as it is, I'd feel safer knowing that, say, the police were driving around the poorly-lit streets of my neighborhood a few extra times a night than knowing that some people who seem to put everyone at zero risk were getting arrested for checking out a car abandoned under extremely unusual circumstances. I'm not all concerned with catching people who break into cars that are parked in front of their houses for weeks on end with the windows down and the keys in the ignition. Call me "soft on crime".

Labels: APD, bait cars, burglary, car theft, crime prevention

posted by Dan   permalink   0 Comments