311 Gets Sassy
From the Brookland neighborhood Listserv: Concerned citizen Andrea on Taussig isn't getting any love from 311. After finding a discarded handbag in an alley, the poster called the non-emergency number to report the missing item. She writes:
I called 311 to report the found bag and got a very strange response. The lady who answered first told me to call the person, since I have their checkbook & license . . . When I told her I couldn't find a phone number, she told me that I should "pull a CSI" and try to figure out how to get in touch with the owner. She then told me that if I turned in the handbag to the police, she didn't know what might happen to it.
Note to Andrea: Please make it a CSI: Miami.
3:58 pm
Another appointee of the former Mayor Barry, hard at work on the case, as usual...
7:03 pm
I had a similar experience. Found a discarded handbag in the alley on my back steps (presumed stolen) -- I did peek inside to find a name or phone number, thinking (foolishly) the point is to get the thing back in the hands of the owner, who was probably missing it rather badly. I didn't think of it as a crime scene. I thought of it as someone's bag that needed to go home. Oopsie!
I didn't find anything identifying the owner inside. Brought it to work, to hand it over to the police: maybe the owner called in a report and they might know who to call (oopsie!). I was then faced with an arrogant pigshit cop who stood there like a pissed-off kindergarten teacher. Sneering at me like a fucking serpent, hissing with attitude that I should not have touched the bag in the first place.
Uh, excuse me? I'm not a trained cop, you nasty leather whore, I'm a concerned citizen trying to help out a neighbor. I didn't get trained in the finer arts of dealing with this kind of stuff. I'm trying to do a good deed here, what the hell, you want me to APOLOGIZE?!?!?
And folks wonder why so many citizens DISTRUST or even HATE the f*cking cops. We're taught by example to feel this way, by the f*cking cops.
8:02 am
The funny thing about that story is just imagining the cops are going to dust for fingerprints on a stolen purse. They were probably pissed off because now they have to find the owner, and that's no fun.
If I found a purse, I would take it home and "do a CSI" to find the owner, too. The cops will just put it in lost and found and wait for the owner to call. If I couldn't find it, then I would take it to the police.
9:39 am
I had my bike stolen a couple years ago and found it for sale on Craiglist a couple of days later. I called the police immediately and after dealing with questions like, "who is Craig and where is his list", explaining the concept of the interweb, and learning that my original police report had been "lost," I was informed by the detective that if I wanted to get the bike back, I could arrange to meet with the seller, then "call 911 once I was witnessing my stolen property."
Oh, and by the way, I'm a woman. So they *advised* me to meet with this bike thief in person, by myself, ask him to wait there with me while I called the police and waited for their arrival. Though that idea sounded rad, I did end up organizing my own little sting operation and eventually got the police involved and got my bike back. The guy got arrested, which was pretty sweet.
But yeah, I learned to not give the police the benefit of the doubt. Which is too bad.