Near miss for our Neighborhood Watch

Well, it's 4:09 am and I'm up anyway so I thought I'd write ya'll about our bit of activity on the street tonight. First note: nursing mothers make great neighborhood watch partners.

I'm the co-chair of our neighborhood watch, which prompted me recently to start keeping my cellphone charger by the bed in case this position might actually produce some important calls in the middle of the night. Sure enough, within a month of moving it, it rang. I got a call from a neighbor around 3:30 am saying that the cops responding to her recent call were after the wrong guys, and could I help in some way. I looked outside to see some of Portland's Finest rousting some ne'er-do-wells in a little Sirocco or something and sending em on their way. This was dandy by me, as they didn't look like very savory characters anyhow. But I did want to gather some info on the actual reason my neighbor called, without sending the mother and small baby out onto the street themselves.

After the cops left, without having shot the young men (our Men in Blue have a bad tendency to do that the last 10 years or so, inspiring nasty comments on blogs as shown here), I got my slippers and purple bathrobe on and walked up the street to get the plates and make of the original car in question. It turned out to be a Toyota minivan, and the man who had been sitting in it for the last hour, with his headlights on, and dome light on, doing God-knows-what, wasn't to be seen. When the cops arrived he had turned off all the lights in the car, and was never seen leaving it.

I called in to dispatch and gave the nice lady the new information, explaining the situation. Very soon afterwards, she called back and said that the car had recently been involved in a burglary, was stolen, and to not in any way approach it. I gave some more details about the position of the thing "north facing, second car on the right side of the street up from _____ street" and then watched out the window as the cops snuck up on the car, guns drawn, to check it out. The evil-dooer was gone by then, but at least the stolen car could now be recovered.

Such is the life of someone living on our street -- little to no endemic crime, but really good access to Max and freeway for hoodlums to dump stolen cars or make drug deals or at least park their cars after partying all night. It never ends, thus the need for our neighborhood watch.

Ok, of to bed, the tow truck is here.

Enjoy your continued crime-less existence,

Bp