Auto Burglary in the Foothills Area Command over the past week

**Admin** Tue Oct 02, 2012 10:37 pm

From: "Garcia, Jill C."
Date: October 2, 2012, 2:57:17 PM MDT
Subject: Auto Burglary in the Foothills Area Command over the past week

Hello Foothills Area Command Neighbors, Community Leaders, and Apartment Partners,

I want to alert you to an unusually high number of auto burglaries occurring in the Foothills Area Command from 9/24/12 to today. Offenders are predominantly using the “smash & grab” technique; looking in vehicle windows and smashing the window to grab what’s inside, usually on the front seat in plain view. Among businesses who were hit this week, restaurant parking lot on Juan Tabo/Comanche (2 victims), hotel/motel at I-40/Juan Tabo (2 victims), bar (Eubank/Montgomery), coffee shops (Eubank/Montgomery), auto repair yard (6 victims at 1 yard on East Central), retail store (Juan Tabo/Central) and Hahn park near Eubank where a baseball game was occurring (2 victims). At apartment complexes we see auto burglaries at 2 complexes off Tramway/Copper and Tramway/I-40 area and another victim at Eubank/Southern; same technique – break the window to enter the vehicle. In our neighborhoods, we were hit very hard at Eisenhower neighborhood boundaries ( Cool

, Oso Grande area (3), John B. Roberts boundaries (2), Matheson Park (2), Mountain Run area (1), Peppertree/Royal Oak (1), and others in Kachina Hills (1), Enchanted Park (1), Embudo Canyon (1) and Princess Jeanne (1).

Common factors were:
Purses, wallets, laptops, backpacks, checkbooks, binoculars, handguns, house keys were stolen from vehicles; one offender popped the trunk to steal a laptop.
This is a list of all property taken in just about a week, and some of this property can be used to commit more serious crimes in the future.

Unforced entries: commonly vehicles were left unlocked
Forced entries: the smash & grab used most often by offenders
Times: reported times are mornings; these types of crimes mostly occur at night and are discovered in the morning, but this is a crime of opportunity and can happen anytime when a target is in view in the vehicle

We have made 1 felony arrest for this activity; hopefully more will occur.

How to protect your property? Do not leave anything of value in your vehicle! Lock up! Roll up windows! Report any suspicious behavior to 242-COPS (2677) and provide our operators with descriptions; if possible, license plates/vehicle descriptions too. If you don’t have access to a locked garage, park in well-lit areas with good sight lines where offenders will be seen and reported. Keep an eye on your vehicle; do not leave anything valuable in the vehicle even if you think you’ll only be gone 5 minutes!! We had a victim recently who left her Blackberry on the front seat of the vehicle and ran into a pizza parlor to pick up her pizza and returned to find her car damaged and Blackberry gone – a 5 minute errand.

The Foothills Officers with APD are:
All briefed on this activity at every shift
Extra patrols have been assigned as of last Thursday to focus on the neighborhoods/target areas listed above.
Do not be surprised if you see marked units in your area; there will likely be units you won’t know about or see also watching your areas.

The next 2 weeks will be heavy rotation and saturation in these areas and we are using predictive crime analysis and our recently hired Crime Analyst to direct officers where to focus based on patterns and trends.
Crime Prevention has alerted Command staff, officers and neighborhood/apartment partner contacts in the Foothills community and Crime Prevention Manager Steve Sink and my NE Area Command counterpart (if they end up working the NE neighborhoods).

On another note,
I have sent out alerts to neighborhoods in the northeast end of the Foothills Area Command about door-to-door solicitors who are bothering residents in Tramway/Academy area, High Desert area, and the Glenwood Hills area. These men are extremely aggressive, using profanity, pounding on doors and frightening our neighbors. Officers encountered 6 solicitors just yesterday and I have received reports of Saturday and Monday activity between 3:00 and 5:00 pm – prime hours for residential burglaries. Our officers ran them out of the area yesterday and said they were extremely rude and disrespectful. This is another example of a 242-COPS (2677) call if you are bothered by this activity; please remember to give our operators good descriptions (gender, race, hair, tattoos, piercings, clothing, direction of travel, etc.); we don’t have any vehicle descriptions for these people and have reports they are all on foot. The descriptions I received are they are all male, African American, have short-cropped hair, always on foot, and empty-handed or with a clipboard selling magazine subscriptions, Bibles, etc. All legitimate door-to-door solicitors must have a City of Albuquerque permit on their person at all times (no ‘it’s with my boss’ or ‘it’s back at the office’ excuses). For my apartment partners, an owner or agent of the property has every right to tell them to leave your premises and an officer can be called via 242-COPS (2677) to Criminally Trespass them if they show up again.

Stay safe, look out for your neighbors and report suspicious activity from a safe place,

Jill Garcia
Crime Prevention Specialist
Foothills Area Command, APD
323-4644

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30