Occasionally I wonder if the province’s police force feels a bit like an exasperated parent. Much like how you might tell a small child to put their toys away, only to step on a building block, the province’s police forces have now launched one of their repeated reminders to tell people to lock their cars and take the keys out. And then nobody listened, as a spree of theft in Moose Jaw saw personal items stolen from unlocked vehicles.
I’ve long been in the habit of locking my own vehicle, habitually tapping the power lock button after I open the door. It’s to the point that I lock it, unlock it immediately after if I remember something in the back seat I needed to grab, and then lock it again. It’s one of those things that has become as much muscle memory as a conscious decision, and if there’s one thing the police force would likely love about me, it’s that – it’s going to be quite hard for someone to steal my car.
It’s actually relatively hard to steal a modern car. Keys have unique electronic signatures to prevent unauthorized entry, circumventing the anti-theft measures aren’t as easy as ripping some wires out of the bottom like in an old movie. Of course, it’s extremely easy to steal a car if the keys are right there, because no matter how many security measures are implemented by the manufacturer every car still needs to start and run with the keys or some equivalent.
The thing with a lot of these crimes is they’re crimes of opportunity. The door is open, sometimes the key is even inside, so it’s a chance to just hop in and grab whatever you want. People grab things from yards – such as my shovel, which I’m still bitter about a full year after someone spirited it out of my back yard – from garages, from the street. While we can judge the thieves harshly, it’s a relatively minor crime and one that is at least preventable to some extent.
Which is not to say that we have to be nice to the people who are stealing our easily accessible belongings, they need to be punished to an appropriate degree. A miscreant who gets into a car and takes a pile of change or gets into a backyard to steal a shovel is still committing a crime, and if caught, should be punished. It’s just that we’re dealing with crimes of opportunity, so if the criminals don’t have the opportunity, there is no actual crime. The motivation isn’t there to have someone go through the effort to circumvent a locked door. While we can lament the fact that they are attempting a crime in the first place, at least they’re lazy enough to ensure it’s not a serious one.
Some will say that if the thief went to the trouble of stealing it, they might need it more than they did. This is a nice coping mechanism which is also completely wrong. The thief doesn’t need my shovel more than me – I had to dig something up in my yard – and knowing some people who committed crimes of opportunity in my youth, they tended to just grab them because they thought it was funny. Naturally, the people who lost their stuff did not find it nearly as funny, but the motivations behind the crimes are hardly as innocent as the thief stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. No, these cases are often a thief stealing a CD because they think it would be a funny thing to listen to, or someone stealing a flag because they thought it would look more interesting as decor in their house. They’re petty crimes for largely petty reasons. As a result, a locked door often prevents the crime just because the joke isn’t worth actual effort.
There will likely be people who lament the state of society that this is even necessary. After all, back in their day you could just keep everything unlocked and people looked after each other. We can lament the collapse of society that leads to people losing small items from their unlocked cars, but when you can prevent this by tapping one button it’s hard to get too worked up about it.
Some might suggest that we need things for bored youth to do, so they don’t try to grab stuff from vehicles and are instead busy doing sports or participating in cultural activities. There are plenty of programs in this city and throughout Saskatchewan designed to accomplish that goal, and it’s great to support them. While that’s a solution to a larger societal problem, it’s not really about the actual, immediate issue and the very simple solution to it. Crimes of opportunity can be solved by tapping a button when we leave our vehicles, and as a result we should probably do that.
It would be really nice if we could all trust each other like the imagined good old days, and if we could allow our stuff to be unlocked without fear of someone grabbing it. But until then, we have a relatively simple way of making our stuff less appealing to criminals, and that’s just listening to police and locking our doors.
