Lock It Or Lose It…..

Lock It Or Lose It

It has become a most predictable call on the police radio in the morning…
“Victim reports her 2004 Ford Navigator was just stolen from her driveway”….
(We whisper to ourselves in our patrol cars – “and the keys were in the vehicle and the vehicle was running”)
The dispatcher continues – “The keys were in the vehicle and the vehicle was running in the driveway…..

Let’s have a quick session in Common Sense 101.

• If you leave your vehicle running, unlocked, and unattended,
• At home
• At work
• At the gas station
• At 7-11
• At the baby sitter’s house
• At the ATM machine
• At school

You WILL lose your car.

Period.
Plain and simple.
Game over.
End of discussion.

I have more sympathy for the crook than I do for the person who leaves their car running and unattended.
Case in point.
A few weeks back in the Sacramento area….
A woman drives to the baby sitter’s house, leaves the car running in the driveway, and takes her 7 or 8 year old daughter into the house first…leaving her 2 year old in the back seat unattended. (Keyword > Unattended)

Couple bad guys come along, see the car, and say “Hey, this lady must want us to steal her car!” And away they go. The woman comes outside, discovers her car is gone – with her son still in it, and it’s shrieking tears, sobs, “oh my God it’s the end of the world….why did this happen to me, this doesn’t happen in this neighborhood,
Boo-hoo-hoo, why me?”
Here let me be the grim reaper here and tell you why Lady…
It happened because of YOU.

Fortunately the 2 crooks looked in the back seat, saw the toddler, and said “Oh Crap.
They did the right thing.
They put the child seat on a front porch, rang the bell, and ran.
To make sure the kid got found; they called the cops and told them where they left the kid. And the car.

Did these 2 guys get caught?
I almost kind of hope not.
Actually I think they had 100 times the amount of common sense than Mom did!
They didn’t lead cops on a 100mph chase endangering lives of innocent motorist – or the child. They recognized they blew it and tried to make it right.

Is it right to steal a car? Nope.
Is it better to use common sense and admit when you blew it? Yup.
In this case, Mom ought to get more time than the thieves – for child endangerment…

Fortunately this only happens every now and then, where a kid is left in the car.
More realistically, what you will lose besides the car is,
Your purse, wallet, laptop computer, cell phone, keys, business papers, briefcase, and worst yet – you set yourself up for a 7-year stint of “Identity Theft”…

If you want to warm your car up to de-ice the windows, at least get a second set of keys so you can lock it while it’s running – preferably keeping it within your view.

The safest thing to do is bundle up, grab a cup of coffee, and deal with the cold.
If it takes 10 minutes of sitting in your driveway while the heater is warming up, so be it.
Read the paper, listen to the radio, do whatever you need to do.

Leaving the car running and leaving it unattended? You got nothing coming by way of sympathy…
But before you go back in the house to get your coffee, run your fingers through the ice on the rear window and spell out…. “Please T a k e M e”
Might as well make it a little easier for the crooks, plus it will give us something to laugh about when we stop it later in the day…

Hey, you be the cop. Most every smart cop out there knows that pursuits aren’t as glamorous as they are portrayed to be on TV. You hear the call that someone left their vehicle unlocked and running – and is now reporting it stolen.

Its early morning with kids walking to school, heavy commute traffic on the streets…..
Are you going to get into a high speed pursuit over someone’s stupidity, and take a chance on having to become involved in tragedy at the end of the line….or are you going to save the pursuit stuff for the serious crimes where there are real life and death victims?

Please don’t “give” your car away.
Please don’t put your cops in a compromising situation.
Simply put – Lock it or lose it!

“Hey, who put this kid in a car seat on my front porch?”

Stay safe America
Jim Lambert
NetCops PSI