Forgot again

Over the weekend, someone got into the victim’s unlocked car and removed his loaded Glock Model 21 .45 caliber pistol from the glove box. When he went to the shooting range on Sunday morning, he discovered the pistol missing. The victim, who holds a Nebraska concealed handgun permit, had apparently forgotten to remove his pistol from the car the previous night. He told us that his habit is to keep to car unlocked because it ordinarily contains no valuables.

It would be a habit worth reconsidering, because it’s not the first time he’s had a gun turn up missing from his car. Back on October 1, 2001 he misplaced his Schofield Model 3 in .44 Russian caliber. He had it at the shooting range, but after a stop for lunch, it was missing from the bag when he got home. It's still missing.

I am aware of a handful of law enforcement officers (including one of our own) who have lost firearms under similar circumstances over the years. Like any other piece of valuable gear, it’s a target of opportunity if not properly secured, and we are all human. You’d like to think, though, that the loss of first one would be a significant emotional experience that would cause you to double and triple check thereafter.

Little early for that…

Weakest point

Over the weekend a burglar struck several homes in northeast Lincoln, all within a half mile of the intersection of N. 84th and Holdrege Streets. While the residents slept, the thief came into the house through the passage door from the garage, and (for the most part) stole purses. Most of the purses and unwanted contents were found strewn about the neighborhood.

Entry into the garages was made through exterior walk-in doors, which were left unlocked in a few cases, but pried open in most cases. For homes with attached garages, this is usually the weakest point, and a common target for residential burglars—particularly daytime burglars.

When I bought my first new house in 1981, the walk-in door to the garage was at the back, pretty well concealed from the neighbors. It was a hollow-core door with a window, and a key-in-knob lock—about as easy to break into as you could possibly imagine.

Your walk-in garage door needs to be up to the same security standards as the other exterior doors: a solid door, with a sturdy jamb, and a deadbolt lock with an absolute minimum one-inch throw. I’d put a secondary bolt on it, personally. I do not have a walk-in door in my current residence, which is even better.

Our burglar seems to have taken advantage of the habit of depositing the purse on the kitchen counter, or some other spot pretty close to the passage door. It made for a quick in-and-out for the burglar, with minimal noise. People rarely lock the passage door between the garage and house—another practice that would be good to change.

Weapon of choice

A few more agencies have joined the ranks of customers of the Omega Group that are offering their residents crimemapping.com as a means of keeping track of crime in their jurisdiction. I think its a decidedly good thing when citizens understand what’s going on in their own community, and realize that the police are dealing with more than the two or three items that happened to make the news on any given day.

The Peoria, Illinois Police Department is one of the recent additions at crimemapping.com. They have great data, and I particularly like the fact that (like Lincoln) Peoria includes short narrative comments for the crimes they map. I think these comments are helpful to understanding the context of crime.

For example, I received a Crime Alert last week pertaining to a crime right around the corner from my house. I’ve subscribed to a buffer of two-tenths of a mile from my address. I probably would not have known about it otherwise, due to the volume of crime we deal with in Lincoln. The comments in the Crime Alert indicated that an unlocked pickup had been entered, and some coins taken from the console. That’s a much different picture than the map alone, had the crime icon been labeled without the comments.

Interestingly, when I visited Peoria and clicked on my very first offense in crimemapping.com, it was this one (click image to enlarge):

I will add the egg McMuffin to my list of odd assault weapons.

By the way, I downloaded the Apple Safari (public beta 4) browser last week. There are definately some performance differences between browsers. I’ve tried Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and IE 8, but Safari is now my weapon of choice for crimemapping.com.

M.O. worth watching

Yesterday's theft at the Berean Church in Lincoln will certainly go down as one of the more interesting heists of the year. A man posing as an employee of the armored car service used by the church walked in wearing a rather generic security uniform. "Carl" was handed the weekend offering of around $145,000, initialed the receipt and waltzed out. About 15 minutes later, the real guard showed up. I wouldn't normally mention the amount (we don't like to entice other criminals), but somehow this already showed up in the press. I wonder if a reporter caught it on the police scanner.

It sounds like a movie plot. Round up Brad Pitt, Robert Wagner, and Pierce Brosnan! I thought there was a good chance that this distinctive modus operandi would show up elsewhere, and did some quick research on the Internet. I haven't found any similar cases, but if any readers of the Chief's Corner have any ideas for search terms or techniques, have at it. It's just a little hard to believe that this smooth operator was a first-timer.

Although most of the offering was in checks (less than $5,000 was cash), that's still a very good haul. Our three convenience store robberies so far this year have netted a combined total of less than $100. I wouldn't be surprised if the same scheme doesn't show up elsewhere in the future. Large congregations, beware.

I stand corrected

I think I will eat my crow before someone dishes it up for me. I shot from the hip--or maybe from the lip. In my previous post I claimed that relative police reporting practices are responsible for the disparity in traffic crash rates between Lincoln and Omaha. In fact, this appears not to be the case. I stand corrected.

Despite differences in our reporting practices (which may still exist), the difference between our crash rates described in the Omaha World Herald article do not appear to be due to the numerator (number of crashes), but rather the denominator: million miles driven. I went to the actual source data, the monthly recapitulations of traffic crash reports from the official keeper-of-the-records: the Nebraska Department of Roads. Here's what the "winter" of 2007-2008 looks like, when you examine box 17 on these monthly reports:

It appears from these data that the crash rates per capita in these cities are very similar. I did the same math for calendar year 2007 and for 2008, with similar results: Lincoln's rate per capita is within a gnat's eyelash of Omaha's: very slightly greater in 2007, very slightly lower in 2008. This would tend to confirm Allstate's ranking of traffic crash claim rates, which put us very close together.

Since the number of crashes lines up with population, the difference in crash rates per million miles driven is attributable to the much greater miles driven in Omaha--way out of proportion to any population difference. One might reasonably conclude that drivers in a larger city drive a little further on average, but that effect should be pretty minuscule. I suspect that the theory floated by Fred Zwonechek of the Nebraska Department of Motor Vehicles concerning the influence of a interstate travel through Omaha upon the million-miles-driven denominator is correct.

In the future, Casady, do your analysis before popping off. Mea culpa.

Neither, it’s the police.

Is it the drivers or the streets? That’s the question Omaha World Herald reporter Tanna Kimmerling asked in the headline of a Saturday article which purports to show that Lincoln more than doubles the wintertime traffic crash rate of Omaha.

It’s neither. This is a classic example of a reporting phenomenon: the Lincoln police department is simply more likely to submit reports of minor collisions to the Nebraska Department of Roads than our Omaha counterparts—particularly collisions occurring during inclement weather. I could reduce our rate dramatically with the stroke of a pen by not submitting reports on non-injury crashes with damages of less than $1,000 to the property of any one person, or by declaring a moratorium on non-injury traffic crash investigations anytime the snow starts falling in appreciable quantities.

A pretty good indicator of the genuine comparison of these two cities would be accident claims filed with insurance companies, rather than police reports filed with the Department of Roads. Allstate Insurance produces just that, with their annual America's Best Drivers Report. For 2008, Omaha and Lincoln ranked 16th and 19tn on the list of the safest of the 200 largest cities in the United States. The link to the 2007 report is dead, but in 2006, the order was reversed: Lincoln 22nd, Omaha 23rd. In 2005 Lincoln was 16th and Omaha 27th.

Suffice it to say that Lincoln and Omaha are neck-in-neck as some of the safest among the 200 largest cities in the United States. Before anyone gets too wound up about how Lincoln drivers are the world’s worst, please review my previous post on this topic, and be prepared to defend your position with something other than your wistful memories of the smooth-and-skilled navigators of the Lake Wobegon freeway system.

Right Lincoln

I got a great email yesterday, from a former Lincoln resident. This time, it was definitely the right Lincoln. The author had discovered our Facebook page, and wrote to tell me about a couple of excellent interactions he had with LPD during his years as a resident of the North Bottoms. Here's an excerpt:

"First of all I was stunned that officers actually responded to the call (I had just recently moved back from [another city] where the police are substandard). They were very professional in taking the report, and then left. I was not expecting them to actually LOOK FOR my bicycle (not a high priority in my own opinion). After they had left I went to work. Twenty minutes after I had arrived at work I got a telephone call from one of the officers. They had found my bike. ...When I asked where they had found it, he told me that he saw a male riding it... I'm taking the long way of saying that I was IMPRESSED with the fact that they were actually looking for the bike. VERY impressed."

Not only was it nice to get some positive feedback with the details about a couple specific examples, was really impressed me was that the writer had such a solid memory of a theft that occurred 11 years ago, on February 28, 1998. The investigating officer, Mike Pratt, saw the bike ride by while he was on another call later than morning, and nabbed a career criminal with an extensive record. He ultimately went to prison a couple years later for another offense, and was released in late 2005. The sudden end to his long string of arrests suggests to me that he probably has moved to another City--a good result for citizens in Lincoln.