Some background. I currently live in a second floor apartment in a duplex with one neighbor downstairs. This is in a residential neighborhood with on street parallel parking.
About 1/2 hour ago my buzzer rang, which is unusual for a Sunday morning. I figured that I was going to have to shoo away some proselytizers or something similar. I went downstairs and found some of my new neighbors from the building next door, a Spanish speaking family, standing on my steps. A young woman who spoke English translated for her uncle (I think that’s who he was). She said that they were looking for the owner of the red car across the street. That car is owned by the man who lives downstairs from me but they apparently only knew that the car was associated with someone at this address. So I rang his buzzer, apparently getting him out of bed.
He came to the door and the woman said that they had found a bunch of his (my neighbor) papers in her uncle’s car, which was parked immediately behind my neighbors. I assume it was the usual auto ID stuff; registration, insurance, etc. that he kept in his glove compartment. His papers, along with the papers from the other man’s glove compartment were scattered all over the seat of the other man’s car. Both cars were unlocked and both glove compartments were open. There didn’t seem to be anything missing or any damage.
They were afraid that they would be accused of breaking into his car but we assured them that we didn’t believe that it was their fault.
My neighbor swears that he locked his car last night. It’s possible he failed to lock it but it would be quite a coincidence if both he and the car immediately behind him had both neglected to lock their cars and then some person had discovered the two unlocked cars and had done whatever the hell he did.
All I can figure is that someone decided to go through their glove compartments looking for anything of value and had sat in the one car going through all of the papers from both and then just left everything there. But what could anyone think they would find that was of value that wasn’t immediately obvious (cash, etc.) without shuffling through papers? And why those two cars? And how did they manage to unlock them? My car was parked a few cars ahead of my neighbor and it was still locked and nothing had apparently been touched. I can’t say if anything happened to anyone else in the neighborhood.
My neighbor doesn’t want to bother calling the police, and the other people, who I assume are undocumented, don’t seem inclined to do so. This concerns me somewhat because apparently someone was in the neighborhood last night with the ability to unlock cars and the inclination to do so and rifle through them.
So what was this person doing and should I be concerned?
Well best to report these things to the police if possible. Maybe your neighbors have a legal person there who could talk to the police? May want to ask your neighbor if it would be all right if you reported it and just he could talk with them?
Anyway if everyone in a neighborhood reports these things, then the police may decide to patrol in your area more often. If no one reports these things, then it will just get worse and worse.
In many areas heroin is becoming epidemic. This results in an increase in break-in type crimes. Best to install camera systems and let the druggies know you have them! (Place signs all over the place saying video surveillance.)
Did they take documents from car A, carry them to car B and examine both sets in car B, leaving things they didn’t want?
They would be less obvious inside a car rather than standing around outside going through documents.
I think that’s exactly what happened. I don’t know what they could have been looking for. People don’t usually keep really valuable stuff in glove compartments.
Maybe they thought that they could find some spare change? But you wouldn’t find that by shuffling through papers, and it would take a lot of break-ins to make it worth the effort if you were looking for spare change.
Maybe I’m overthinking this. People who are going around breaking into cars probably aren’t all the cerebral and don’t think about risk / reward ratios.
Edited to add. I just had a thought. They might have been looking for spare keys. These were both big nice looking vehicles, and I know that at least my neighbor’s car is relatively new, as opposed to my little 2010 Honda Insight.
Not Unusual. Some late-night drug user was out checking car door locks. They look for drugs in the cars, or something to sell like your glasses or your iPod.
I can’t help to explain what went on in this case, but will just add that strange shit happens. My car was broken into once and nothing was taken, but the entire contents - CDs, change, receipts, bottles of water, half eaten packets of mints etc - were all arranged in nice neat little piles on the back seat.
There’s nowt queerer than folk, as they say in Yorkshire.
Main guess is they were looking for something they could use for identity theft. If your neighbors car was a modern, nicer car as you indicate it’s unlikely they could have got into it without it being open. Likely just drug addicts trying the door handles to see if they could get lucky.
I agree with Me_Billy that it does need to be reported. Our city PD posts on Facebook about once every 3 months reminding people to please report crimes and suspicious activity. Nothing can get done unless they know about it, and they hate hearing “Oh yeah this has happened a bunch of times before…” when something does end up reported.
AFAIK local cops aren’t on the lookout for undocumented people…it’s not their jurisdiction, there’s nothing they can do about it. Right?
I can’t force someone to report a crime, and I’m not sure if I can report something that didn’t affect me; and I might piss off my downstairs neighbor if I do.
Someone opened the (unlocked) door of my neighbor’s car some months ago and took an iPhone charger cable and the insurance certificate. We could never come up with any scenario that would explain that.
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Weird. My car was broken into and the only thing taken was an iphone cable too.
They broke into the neigbour’s car too and looked through both our gloveboxes - the police suggested they may have been looking for spare keys as apparently some people keep them in their registration/car manual booklets.
