On Crime

As most of you know, I live in an "interesting" area of town that is undergoing urban renewal. Unfortunately, this change in demographics isn't happening quick enough, and we've got quite a bit of a crime problem for an area that contains million dollar homes (I don't live in one, but they're just up the block). The result is that in the mornings you can wander through our neighborhood and find cars with busted out windows more often than not. Today, there were two vehicles on my block with busted out windows, and the contents of these vehicles had been pilfered.

Now, I'm not going to complain about the crime rate or that there are crimes committed in the area that I live in because I know crime happens and I live where I do by choice. What I don't understand, though, is why isn't this type of crime easy to stop. Think about it. If you've got a particular area of town that is hit almost every night by people wandering around breaking into cars, how difficult could it be to find the people engaging in this activity and stop them? All you'd have to do is put have some plain clothed officers hide in some obvious areas and watch the traffic throughout the night. It shouldn't take more than a couple of nights to find the people who are doing this and arrest them. If there's more than one group, it might take longer, but you'd eventually get them all arrested or at least moved out of that neighborhood.

I feel the same way about cars that get striped on the side of the highway, the well lit highway that has cars driving up and down it all night every night. How does this happen in the first place without someone noticing, and how is it that the police can't stop it from happening? Seriously. Put a couple cars out with nice rims, and then have them watched from a distance. Arrest anyone who pulls over and gets out of their vehicle with a jack and tire iron.

Oh, and when someone calls to report a crime, take the info that they're providing. Who cares if they're the actual owner of the vehicle that was broken into. The crime still happened.