PREVENTING CAR PROWLS- A Strategy

The recent car prowl activity in Crystal Hills has led to some thoughts about how we can prevent car prowls. During the early morning hours of Sunday, May 30 at least three vehicles were broken into in Crystal Hills.

The current recommendation by police to prevent a car prowl is to not have anything visible in your vehicle. That way a potential car prowler will move on to another target. Car prowlers are opportunists. They look for the easiest targets.

The easiest way for all of us to prevent crime (especially property crime) is to take away a criminal's opportunity to steal (think the Crime Triangle- Crime = Opportunity + Motivation + Knowledge). I don't know how many folks take this simple advice. Obviously, not everyone. But you could still be victimized if a car prowler breaks your car window because he/she thought they saw something. You might not have had anything stolen, but you're still out the cost of replacing your window.

If a car prowler goes through a community, he/she can still do property damage as well as steal from those who keep valuables in their car. Our natural tendancy is to want to catch the crook.

Catching car prowlers might seem to be difficult though. In residential areas they work at night when most of us are asleep. Night or day, the Sheriff's Office deputies can't be everywhere. So what can citizens do to help the Sheriff's Office?

Well, an additional activity that local communities can do is encourage their neighbors who are night owls (those that stay up late at night or who go to and from work at night or early morning) to keep an eye out and report any suspicious activity to 911 that they see. We can also park our cars in our locked garage. Some folks may not have enought room in their garages, so another step that they can take is to mount a camera on their garages. At least with a camera, that is hooked up to a computer hard drive, if you are victimized, you can show a deputy the images that will hopefully show the car prowler in the act. In this way, you and your neighbors make your neighborhood difficult for car prowlers to work in.

The Herald recently reported that Everett has had a spike in car prowls. I don't know if that is the case in the rest of the county but it is likely that we may be having an increase in car prowls also. This might be a good time to:

1. Encourage your neighbors not to store anything in their cars or trucks.

2. Encourage your neighbors to report any suspicious activity to 911, day or night.

3. Think about installing a camera on your garage.


Steve Moller