The police, and neighbors, help prevent crime
Posted on Sunday, November 16, 2008
Inormally do not pick up my cell phone if it goes off while I’m driving. And I almost never answer it unless I recognize the caller—life is too short to listen to political robocalls. So I don’t know why I picked up that morning. All I knew was that the call was coming from the 501 area code. It was after the election. I expected a wrong number. Instead it was a police dispatcher, who told me one of my neighbors had just seen a man go over our back fence. Officers were on the scene. They weren’t sure if the guy was still there, in our yard or in our house. I asked if our dogs were all right. She told me one of the officers was in visual contact with the dogs and they looked fine though they were “going crazy.” I told her I was two minutes from the house. She told me not to have a wreck getting there.
I didn’t quite realize the situation when I pulled up. I unlocked the front door and two officers came into the house with their guns drawn. I probably should have stayed outside, but I wanted visual contact with the dogs myself. They were fine. No one was in our house. No one had been in our house. There weren’t any obvious signs that someone had tried to break into the house. Someone had run out our back gate. Though it was locked he’d been able to force it apart. He’d left in a hurry. When the cops came to look at the gate, I tried to quiet our terriers, who—from a safe distance—were giving the officers what for.
“Don’t do that,” one of the cops said. “Let ’em bark. Good dogs.”
A few days after the fact, I’ve got a little perspective. What happened at our house probably happens 15 times a day in our town. Nobody got hurt and nothing was damaged. The police were efficient and thorough and did the best they could but the guy got away.
I don’t know that the guy meant to break in or take anything—he may have been looking for a shortcut from point A to B. He might not have been a thief, he may have been lazy.
I don’t know that he ever got in the yard where our dogs were—there is another fence he’d have had to hop. He didn’t set off the alarm—there were only a couple of minutes between the time my neighbor saw him go over the fence and the police arrived.
It was the middle of the day. My neighbor didn’t hesitate to call the police. (This might seem like a natural thing to do but I’ve lived in places where you couldn’t assume your neighbors would be looking out for you. ) She had my number to give to the dispatcher because another neighbor had, a year ago, taken it upon himself to collect contact information for all the houses on our street and distribute it to everyone.
It worked out OK. We had good neighbors, good dogs and good luck.
Bad things happen and are not always avoidable. You can collide with the desperate and irrational, with the reckless and insensible, at any time. You cannot imagine, much less prevent, every possible danger.
You don’t want to live a frightened life, locked inside a compound like an exiled dictator, but common sense requires that you take certain precautions. Trust, but verify. Try not to be an easy mark.
There is another way to look at it. If you and I are being chased by a bear, I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you. All I have to do to deter a burglar is to make it more inconvenient for him to break into my house than it is yours. If our neighborhood is less pregnable than yours, maybe the criminals will move downstream.
That sounds brutally Darwinian, and it is. My neighborhood is safer than some and less safe than others. We don’t leave our doors unlocked, but we don’t often hear gunfire at night. It’s not perfect; about a year ago we had a rash of residential burglaries, some of which were committed in broad daylight.
Most of these burglaries were explicable; people presumed homeless kicked in doors and took money or booze or food and ran away. That’s bad, but you can understand it. Others were spookier—people were at home when someone broke in. What’s worse, they have reason to believe he knew they were there and he came in anyway. They think he was armed. I’m glad we see more police cars in the neighborhood than we did 18 months ago, even if it means those officers aren’t elsewhere. I’m selfish like that.
But you can’t rely on the police to prevent crime, especially not crimes of opportunity committed by people who don’t have a lot to lose. If someone is determined to do violence, there’s not much you can do in the way of avoiding confrontation. Sometimes you have to accept the bad fortune that comes your way—take your loss or your whuppin’.
I don’t so much worry about the whuppin’ —I know they happen but I can’t think of what I could do short of buying a sidearm and getting a concealed carry permit that could prevent it.
I’ve thought about that but decided—at least for now—that it’s not a viable option for me. I know a lot about guns and I think the Constitution gives citizens the right to own them and that a lot of people handle then responsibly. Still, there’s something dark and unwholesome about America’s gun fetish—the contention that more guns make us safer is simplistic and wishful. Handguns may be necessary, but there’s no doubt they’re evil, or at least anti-life. Tell you the truth, I don’t worry so much about home invasion, though I know it happens. If someone breaks into our house they’ll have to contend with ill-tempered residents, baseball bats, vicious terriers and alert neighbors. I’ve seen how fast the police can respond, and it makes me feel better. I want to believe that our close call, or whatever it was, decreases the chances that our number will come up again, but I know that’s magical thinking. We have to pay attention, to watch out for one another, to be good neighbors. After the adrenaline cleared from my system, I thought about how we should respond. A higher fence ? Razor wire ? A video surveillance system ? A gun ? The next morning I bought a nasty new lock for the back gate, one that couldn’t be sprung easily. I thought about what else we might do. All I can think of is to hope.
pmartin@arkansasonline. com
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online