You may have seen the following AP article in this morning's The Herald, "IPhone burglar no match for GPS" (http://bit.ly/b0Svhz).
According to the AP:
"A Wauwatosa, Wis., man whose Apple iPhone was stolen from his car used GPS to track it down.
Tiernan Paine left a $400 phone in his unlocked car while at Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses in Oak Creek on Thursday night.
The 28-year-old subscribes to MobileMe, a service that synchronizes data between his phone and home computer. It also includes a global positioning system.
Paine told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he pinpointed his phone's location and saw a picture of the suspect's home.
Paine took the material to Oak Creek police.
The next day, he and another church member who also had a phone stolen that night had their phones back.
Police Chief Tom Bauer says the suspect confessed to about six thefts from parked cars."
There is good news and bad news with this story. The bad news is that the Wisconsin man left his phone in view of his unlocked car. Police remind the public time and again not to keep anything in view in a parked vehicle and to lock your car. The good news is that he did not act like a victim. He did not give up. He did not expect police to recover his phone by themselves. He took action to help the police by locating his phone and passing the information to police. The technology is not important. If all he had was the phone's serial number that is more help than police receive most of the time.
The point is to take the opportunity, whenever we can, to prevent crime and to aid police no matter how small the effort.
Steve Moller
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