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Friday, July 11, 2008

CALL THE POLICE

This is Stephen V. Cole Posting:

When a crime happens, call the police (or the sheriff or whoever is responsible for your area), even if you think it won't do any good. Sure, the police are overworked and the crime you suffered was minor in the overall scheme of things, but call them anyway. Respect their time and have a report written for them (printed out nicely on your computer) before they arrive.

Modern police work uses powerful software for pattern analysis. Thousands of minor crimes go into a database, and data-mining software can find patterns that human eyes will never see. The burglary of $100 worth of your stuff may be trivial, but twenty such burglaries in your neighborhood is a problem that needs to come to an end before it gets a lot worse. If the police can connect several cases (cases that were properly reported) they can combine the clues from all of those cases and come up with enough information to identify and prosecute the criminals.

When a crime happens, sit down and write your own report. Everything you saw and heard. Everything out of the ordinary in the previous few days. Sometimes a crime happens so fast that the details are blurry. Here's a trick. Start with breakfast that morning and write down everything you saw and did for the entire day, in the order it happened. You'd be surprised how this trick will suddenly remind you of things you saw during those blurry moments of the crime in progress. If you find yourself in a situation (say, you see a crime happening down the street) instantly look at your watch and burn the time in your memory. That datapoint (and the watch which can be compared to some "official" time for accuracy) is the single key piece of information on which all other information hangs.

Don't say "It's only a few bucks". Call the police and hand them a report. (Heck, offer to go to the police station, but they'll probably want to send someone to the scene of the crime anyway.) Then take a few minutes and listen to the policeman's advice on how to prevent such crimes in future.