We Are Not Amused

[Thriller]

Went out for a meeting this morning and saw this.

 

 

 

 

Most of a door window pretty much fills an ice cream bucket.  Some bits got ground up in the seat rails and of course the door now sounds like a maraca.

 

 

They went through the car, but nothing was taken...the scumbag(s) apparently didn’t see any value in what was there.  Of course, their skin is probably happy I didn’t come across them and “accidentally” kick some punk asses.  Police report is done and insurance initial report is done, but being a long weekend up here, I can’t do anything more until Tuesday.

 

😡😡🤬🤬🤬😡🤬🤬🤬

 

Addition: I phoned Luke, woke him up and asked him to put plastic over the hole as we were going to get some rain.  While he was out, a next door neighbour was out and they’d had a smash and grab.  Grrrrrrr.......

 

Edited June 29, 2019 by Thriller (see edit history)

[60FlatTop]

1 hour ago, Thriller said:

They went through the car, but nothing was taken.

 

That happened to my Wife and I. They went through both our cars, emptied everything, CD's strewn all over. And not a thing missing. I have heard people talk about incidents like that and they said they felt violated by the act.

 

Well, in our case we just felt kind of rejected.

Bernie

[Marty Roth]

While this sort of thing was recently only in other neighborhoods, we've had a cople of break-ins here as well,

one half a block from our old home two blocks from here where our son and daughter-in-law live, and then here on our block where the perps smashed a window and took cash and a handgun - all caught on camera but not identifiable - and using a stolen car!

 

I did have that happen to two of our vehicles several years back, but only a radar detector was taken. Replacing the windows on a Suburban and a Buick Century were a reminder of the feeling of violation.

[JohnD1956]

Sad stuff Thriller!  Sad stuff!  They were probably looking for the loose change that many leave in their car.  Sure wish there was a fool proof way to stop this kind of stuff. 

[Thriller]

Suzanne’s car...her CDs...I can’t feel rejected by that, although someone else mentioned the same sort of thing.

 

It’s just rather frustrating how hard it is to keep nice things nice.  Hopefully once repaired everything will be back to normal, but I fear that they either won’t get all the glass out of the door so it rattles, or getting the door panel back on will result in in not fitting right or squeaking / rattling.  Sigh.

 

And for some reason the “law” would take a dim view of removing their hands or similar.  I don’t get it.  Some days I want to go back to the Old Testament way of doing things.

 

[old-tank]

1 hour ago, JohnD1956 said:

Sure wish there was a fool proof way to stop this kind of stuff. 

Locked in a garage.

[cxgvd]

It's your nieghbourhood.  I live in a small village and I do not lock my vehicles.  If someone needs my loose change they are welcome to take it.

 

Regards, Gary

[JohnD1956]

8 hours ago, old-tank said:

Locked in a garage.

 

When some malcontent is bent on doing damage, a locked garage won't do the trick.  Maybe a locked garage with a moat around it filled with Piranhas, and a bloodthirsty and hungry pit bull inside?   👍

 

[Bill Stoneberg]

Or in Old-Tank's case, he could just put Henry in there.  Its his miniature version of a Pit Bull.

 

Me, my doors are unlocked, there is nothing in the car worth breaking glass over. If they want the 68 cents in the cupholder, they can have it.

[Jack Welch]

1 hour ago, Bill Stoneberg said:

Or in Old-Tank's case, he could just put Henry in there.  Its his miniature version of a Pit Bull.

 

Me, my doors are unlocked, there is nothing in the car worth breaking glass over. If they want the 68 cents in the cupholder, they can have it.

Locked doors only stop honest people. I really hate to see this sort of thing becoming an issue in Canada. Whenever I go there, I always feel just a bit safer the most places in the US. Sorry to say , but it has been that way for many years.

[Thriller]

It’s always been going on in some way, shape or form.  Some years ago, someone was siphoning diesel from my truck.  A locking fuel cap was the next order of business.  We also had damage one time to the locks / driver door of the truck and the Rainier.  I’ve got an oversized double garage that hasn’t been an issue (except for one time when others forgot to lock the Lucerne we had at the time and they just opened the garage door with the opener in the car and took a bicycle).  My challenge is that in the summer, the old iron that is easy to steal winds up in the garage and the modern vehicles wind up outside.  The only real solution is to have fewer vehicles or to move outside the city where everything can be stored inside locked buildings which then don’t need to be locked because people walking by is a rarer occasion in the first place.  That increases fuel costs and puts additional wear and tear on the vehicles to commute.

 

It is what it is, just frustrating.

 

[JohnD1956]

While it may not help in this situation, one thing I have been doing, for years, is waving to everyone who walks or drives by.  When we moved here 20 years ago I knew none of the neighbors.  Then we had someone, or two, driving on the grass at the edge of the property.  Then we started to have a lot of litter like used fast food bags,  tossed on the side of our property that is not so readily visible.  Then I started this waving procedure, especially targeting the teens and always said hello to all the people walking by when I was out there.    Practically all of them wave back or say hello too.  Miraculously, most of this bad activity stopped. 

 

I think it was their perception that they may know us, so they were not so callous anymore.  And I did eventually come to know maybe 60% of the neighbors this way too.  Kinda a bonus.  To this day it amazes me that some of my neighbors have no idea who is living within 10 houses of their own. 

[J.H.Boland]

I live in a rural area, but break ins happen. My garage was broken into, through a sliding glass window (since reinforced and alarmed). I count my blessings that all they stole was a cantankerous chain saw and a gas can (of regular fuel). Nothing was vandalized.  I think I saw my chainsaw for sale on Kijiji a few weeks later. The seller was being honest (!) ,saying that it would start eventually !

[JohnD1956]

1 hour ago, J.H.Boland said:

I think I saw my chainsaw for sale on Kijiji a few weeks later. The seller was being honest (!) ,saying that it would start eventually !

😅

[jeff_a]

I used to live in a part of Kansas City where John Deere riding lawn tractors were being stolen a lot. One was taken from the place I worked at. The cops said don't feel too bad, one was taken recently from a garage where they had to roll a Corvette out of the way and back in to get the tractor out!

 

Edited July 1, 2019 by jeff_a (see edit history)

[60FlatTop]

16 hours ago, jeff_a said:

The cops said don't feel too bad,

A man sees someone breaking into his shed. He calls police. They say they don't have anyone available right now. They'll be there as soon as they can, but it may be two hours. The man hangs up.

A few minutes later he calls again and tells them to take their time. He's pulled out his rifle and shot the man. He's not going anywhere. Within minutes the place is swarming with police, helicopters, cars, dogs, etc. They find the man breaking into the shed and arrest him.

The police go to the man, "I thought you said you shot him!" The man responds "I thought you said you had no one available"

16 hours ago, jeff_a said:

[Larry Schramm]

I agree that locks are only for honest people. 

[Matt Harwood]

I'm sorry this happened. It's a small, stupid thing but you always feel violated somehow even if they don't steal anything personal. I think it's just the idea that part of humanity isn't like you, not wired the same, and it's hard to understand that mindset. It feels almost alien.

That said, it's my policy to simply leave the doors unlocked on all my cars. If someone wants in, they're going in. Why make it expensive and inconvenient for me to replace the stuff they break? Let them in, let them take whatever worthless nothing I keep in the car, and they move on. No need to break a window or tear off a door handle, especially on the old cars where such things are unobtainium.

There's a guy at our local cruise night who always locks his car up at shows, puts a club on the steering wheel (this is a 1952 Chevy), and has one of those chirping alarms. Every single show that alarm is going off at some point and he has mentioned repeatedly that he locks it up like that because someone broke into his car on two separate occasions and he's not going to let that happen anymore. That suggests two things: one, maybe his over-security makes him a bigger target, and two, maybe there have been people in my car more often than I think, yet they leave no trace because there's nothing to steal. In this guy's case, there's no way to get in without breaking stuff, so thieves break in and leave visible evidence. Maybe my unlocked car has been visited by thieves who find nothing and move on without doing any harm. Hmmm...

[trimacar]

Car alarms are one of the most useless things ever put on a vehicle.  How many times have you heard a car alarm go off, and people are running to the car to see if it's being tampered with?  Never.

 

I have a nephew who once lived in Pittsburgh, he's an actor and did a lot of Shakespeare there in local theaters.  We went to see him and his work once, and saw the car he was driving.  It was the worst looking vehicle I think I've ever seen that was actually tagged and on the road.  He said that car break ins are so common there that the best defense is to drive something no one wants, no one would steal, no one would think had anything of value in it.  He left doors unlocked and, most of the time, windows down.

 

It's a shame that some people think nothing of destroying or stealing other people's property.

[Thriller]

The car is in this morning to get the window replaced and the door cleaned out.  It should be done by about noon.  

 

One of the challenges here is that I’m not sure there is insurance coverage for theft if you leave it unlocked.  I’ll need to look into that.  My insurance renews in August so I will have an opportunity to discuss it.  We did have an issue years back with children (under 12 can’t be prosecuted here at all, so older ones taught young ones how to steal a car and they’d go for joyrides) stealing cars.  It got to the point that an immobilized program was put in place and if they deemed your vehicle to be a model that was at risk / most targeted, you were forced to install an immobilized (I think for “free”), and you got a discount on your coverage, but if you didn’t you couldn’t renew the registration.  They wanted me to put an immobilized on the pace car, but I was able to get an exemption.  That’s a BS letter you get when you tell me a 1976 Century is among the top 10 stolen vehicles in Winnipeg when you can likely count the numbers of those around on one hand.

 

There was once an alarm going off on the street in front of our house with a fellow walking around the vehicle.  It went on long enough that I got through on the police non-emergency line.  As the vehicle was perpendicular to me I couldn’t see a plate.  After several minutes, they guy got in and drove off and the operator on the line asked me what I wanted to do.  I told her to record that I’d called in case a vehicle was reported stolen from this location and they did nothing.  We live just off a busy street with police presence going by all the time, so one could likely have been diverted down our street.  Oh well.

 

[8E45E]

On ‎6‎/‎30‎/‎2019 at 5:30 AM, cxgvd said:

It's your nieghbourhood.  I live in a small village and I do not lock my vehicles.  If someone needs my loose change they are welcome to take it.

 

Regards, Gary

A number of years ago, I had a customer with an older Ford F150 1/2 ton work truck which had the opening vent windows on the doors.   One Sunday, she went to one of their account customer's house to drop off an invoice for some work they had done, and she left her copy in the glove compartment.  When she got home, she parked it in front of their house just before dinnertime, and left it UNLOCKED as she had a couple of bags of groceries she bought along the way, and with her hands full, she was planning to retrieve her paper copy of the invoice from the glove compartment when they were done eating. In the end, she never went back out to the truck to get the invoice copy, and the truck was left unlocked all night.   The next morning when she went to drive to the office, someone had smashed the vent window to 'break' in.  What really pissed her off was, the would-be thief (who left empty handed as there was nothing in it of value to steal), didn't try the door handle first!

 

Craig 

[Thomas J. Bianculli]

On 6/30/2019 at 12:28 PM, Thriller said:

 " My challenge is that in the summer, the old iron that is easy to steal winds up in the garage and the modern vehicles wind up outside. "

 

 Old Iron easy to steal???  I doubt the average car thief would know the starter is on the gas pedal on old Buicks, nor can he drive a standard transmission.

Here in Pittsburgh we had an idiot attempt to carjack a stick vehicle then just run away confused.

[Matt Harwood]

40 minutes ago, Thomas J. Bianculli said:

 

 Old Iron easy to steal???  I doubt the average car thief would know the starter is on the gas pedal on old Buicks, nor can he drive a standard transmission.

Here in Pittsburgh we had an idiot attempt to carjack a stick vehicle then just run away confused.

 

Yep. I leave the keys in my old cars at shows and onlookers lose their minds. I tell them that if they can figure out how to start it, it's theirs. Thieves aren't interested in old cars because they can't be easily sold. And can you imagine trying to make your getaway in something so conspicuous and [relatively] slow? No, most old cars are 100% theft-proof simply because the thieves don't want them.

[Thriller]

4 hours ago, Thomas J. Bianculli said:

 

 Old Iron easy to steal???  I doubt the average car thief would know the starter is on the gas pedal on old Buicks, nor can he drive a standard transmission.

Here in Pittsburgh we had an idiot attempt to carjack a stick vehicle then just run away confused.

 

It depends what you have.  Yes, my 1941 Special with the carburetor switch and three on the tree manual would eliminate many possible thieves.  However, my collection spans from 1923 to 1988.  I was thinking more of the 1970s stuff that was easy to get into, and relatively easy to hotwire compared to the new vehicles with their theft-deterrent systems.

 

Even with the carburetor switch, someone might get lucky just by hitting the gas.

 

[old-tank]

20 hours ago, Thriller said:

Even with the carburetor switch...

Oops, maybe I should not be demonstrating at car shows!