Can’t Prepare For This...

A few weeks back, we were out on patrol. Contrary to what the newspapers say, the areas we patrol for the most part are safe. Our primary function on the midnight shift is doing property checks, mostly between 3am and 6am when there are very few cars on the road. If we’re unlucky enough to be assigned patrol in the area of multi million dollars homes it sure is deadly……..boring. (Gotcha!) So usually there’s not much to do except drive around and make sure our taxpayers and their property are safe. So on this night we are patrolling the parking lots, where many GPS devices are being stolen from cars as people shop, checking things out and maintaining a visible presence. (Here’s a public service announcement for my readers: if you have own a portable GPS and store it in your car, 1. don’t leave it in plain sight, 2. don’t leave the mounting bracket on the dashboard or stuck on the windshield, and 3. don’t leave the cord out in plain sight or worse leave it plugged in and the cord leading into the center console...the burglar doesn’t need to have more than a third grade education to find it by following the path of the cord). There have been upwards of 2 calls per day of these GPS devices being stolen…in our quiet neck of the woods in daylight and in jammed packed parking lots, so it’s much worse other places you can be sure of that!

So anyways, we’re driving around and just checking things out. We see a car with its lights on and being the helpful police officers that we are, go to see how we can assist. Of course we always follow protocol: on the radio we broadcast our location, description of the vehicle and license plate number….just in case the stuff hits the fan. It comes back valid. We were just going to take the license number down and just go into the store to make an announcement. I then noticed that the trunk was not shut completely and that sparked my interest…so I get out and take a look. And you would never believe what I saw. It was an older car, from the 1970 and had one of those seats that go from one side of the car to the other, you know, so that three people can sit side by side in the front...we call em bench seats. Well, it was a cold 27°F night and this guy was sleeping in his car. I wouldn’t be alarmed by this, maybe he was on a long trip…but he was using cardboard to cover himself from the cold. The back seat was filled with a bunch of junk. I had no doubt he was homeless. So as I felt my heart sink, I start thinking out loud. Do we wake him up and tell him to turn his lights off, thereby saving him the panic of staring his car in the morning or worse having to buy a new battery, which probably he couldn’t afford. Do we open the car door and turn the lights off without waking him and risk getting into trouble for that…remember we are cops and we could be wrongly accused of doing improper things, even if we had the welfare of the person in mind when we did it. In the end, we just left him. There were no laws being broken, but my heart sure was breaking, thinking of this poor guy in the morning, cursing himself for leaving the lights on.