Crimes I've just heard of

[JG-HPP]

There was at least one house burglarized & trashed in Orchidland
yesterday. The owner came home to the activity and said the bad
guys all sped off in a small silver sedan. They stole everything
not nailed down and did a lot of damage.

So beware of a small, silver car with 3-4 guys scoping out the
neighborhood.

While speaking to the police, he was told about the "300" game.
Supposedly there are groups or individuals that are in competition to
steal 300 cars, the last being a police car.

This could explain so many stolen vehicles being dumped and another
stolen at that place, cars being torched or purposely wrecked. There
is no monetary value for tweakers in a wrecked car so it seems like
just part of the game.

The police know who these people are. Why can't they be arrested?

I also heard about a group in Fern Acres going door to door mid-day begging for gas. The person that told me this was sure they were
staking out the area to see who is gone during the day.

[geochem]

We've got some serious bad $h*t going on on this island right now. I took a very hard hit last week - thieves cut the lock on my gate, tried to steal my car parked in the garage - but were thwarted by its installed security system - then broke into my house, stole a few things - but can't really be sure what, because they then burned the house to the ground just for fun.

Given an opportunity for 20/20 hindsight, my advice to anyone who spends any time at all away from home (these guys did their work in less than an hour and a half) is to get and install a video system that dumps the images to the cloud (a stand-alone would have done me no good at all since all that was left of the house was a thin layer of ash and metal/glass/ceramic debris). Realizing that even with a cloud data storage, you still could lose the house before fire can respond...

[Rob Tucker]

Yipes!

[PaulW]

geochem, that's awful!! My sympathies. Whereabouts was this? I'm guessing the alarm system was able to give you all that information about the what happened?

Yes, internet-enabled cameras with motion detection and alerts are a very good idea, if you have always-on internet. The cops may have gotten there in time to stop it.

[randomq]

Arm yourselves, the police will not help. We have a repeat burglar in the Acres that is allegedly a police informant, yet the police are not helping or compensating anyone she robs. She is probably going to end up in a puka, not that her ****ty family cares.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

geochem -
I hope your car was OK, and didn't get damaged in the fire.
Did the car alarm go off? If it activated, and didn't scare off the arsonist burglars, there are definitely some fearless thieves at work in the area.

Four people are in a room and seven leave. How many have to enter again before it's empty?

[rbakker]

I got burgled recently. Everyone, don't be a dummy like me and buy cameras only AFTER the thieves turn up. Buy them now!
I bought some cameras but they only alert me some of the time, so still looking for good ones, recommendations welcome.
With email alerts you can send the police to catch them red-handed, or failing that you have real evidence of who did the break in.

[Rob Tucker]

Buy GPS tracking devices and install one in a prime item for theft. If and when its stolen it can be tracked back to the thieves den.

[terracore]

The last two mornings they've dedicated two cops to giving out tickets on 130 to people driving to work, rather than looking for the scum that are stealing from people just trying to earn a living. Talk about messed-up priorities. There's been a LOT of burglaries in Orchidland and I've never once seen a constable on patrol. But I watch my speed damnit.

[Hawaii Bound]

There is no money in catching thieves and it usually requires some work. However, those tickets pay money quick with relatively zero work!