My car just got stolen
Tonight, I drove over to my friend’s house for a party, and parked on a nice (well, as nice as it gets around the University) residential street right under a streetlight. Six hours later, I come out find that the car is gone. So I call the local non-emergency police line. They inform me that my car was not towed, and dispatch a cop. Ten minutes later, an extremely polite, extremely helpful, very competent City of College Park officer arrives. He asks me all the questions, investigates the scene, and tells me all sorts of fascinating facts about car theft and car thieves. He also tells me that unfortunately, he can’t really help me. The issue is that the City of College Park ends right there at the edge of the grass. Everything beyond — including the patch of concrete where my car was parked six hours earlier — is City of Hyattsville, so my car is their responsibility. And so we wait for twenty minutes for a Hyattsville cop. He never arrives, and the College Park cop finally sends me to the (rather distant) Hyattsville police station to personally report the crime to Corporal So-and-so. I point out that I don’t have a car. The officer points out that if I want to get my car back, I need to make sure it’s entered in the stolen-car database by 3am, so getting to Hyattsville quickly is in my interest. At this point, it’s almost 2am. My friends, being kind and decent people, volunteer to drive me.
We arrive at the Hyattsville police station. I ask the on-duty officer that I need to report a car theft to Corporal So-and-so. The on-duty officer tells me that Corporal So-and-so will be with us shortly. We wait for an hour (fortunately, I have my DS with me), only to have the on-duty officer inform me that Corporal So-and-so is investigating a traffic accident, that he won’t be coming back to the police station any time soon, and that if I want to report a crime, I better go to a Prince George’s County police station. Fortunately, there is one nearby. Unfortunately, the only parking is in a pay garage; I buy a one-hour ticket.
At the Prince George’s police station, we are second in line. In front of us are some kids trying to get their friend out of jail. (They claim he tried to break up a fight, but when the cops came, he was the only to who got arrested.) The kids’ efforts are in vain; after many phone calls and long waits, it turns out that he is still being interrogated by the police, and won’t be out for at least several hours. Finally it’s our turn. I start to report the crime. The Prince George’s County police lady asks for the address. I say that it was parked on Street X, on the block between intersections with Street Y and Street Z, near a group of trees, across a patch of grass from Apartment Building number so-and-so, and that for all further details, she could contact the College Park cop who investigated the scene. But that’s not good enough for her; she needs the exact address on the street where I left my car. In Prince George’s County, without an exact address, there is no crime. I should go back to the crime scene, make better notes, and stop wasting valuable police time. (Apparently, calling the City of College Park police, or looking at the high-resolution map of Prince George’s County she has on her desk, or even opening a satellite image from Google Maps on her computer, is too much of an effort.)
But there is still hope! Another one of my friends is still at the apartment. He is a guest, unfamiliar with the area; but how hard is it to walk fifty meters and look at the house number on the other side of the road? It takes us only five minutes of phone calls to wake him up (it’s 3:45am). We tell him to go outside, across the lawn and the road, and tell us what the house number is. Fifteen minutes later, he still hasn’t called us back; we call him on his cell; it turns out that in his zombie-like woke-up-at-3:45 state, he got lost in the darkness. Recalling various landmarks in the neighborhood, we manage to navigate him over the cell phone. (During this process, we had to go pay to extend our parking.) Finally, we have a house number. Except by this time, there is another person in front of us.
It is a woman, trying to file a complaint about her loving son, a school student, who threatened her and stole thousand dollars’ worth of property from her apartment. The woman is very angry, very loud, difficult to reason with, keeps changing her story, is clearly suspicious of police, and so taking her report takes its toll on both the Prince George’s County police lady and on the audience (us). By this point, my friends are starting to fall over from sleep deprivation, but the complaining woman’s screams keep them from dream’s sweet embrace. Finally, the woman is given the phone number of a detective that she should talk to, and is sent on her way. The police lady is noticeably friendlier now (since unlike her previous interviewee, I am polite). I file my stolen car report; and by the time we get out of the police station, it’s close to 5am.
So what happens now?
I have no idea. The car is old, the paint is chipped, there are rust spots, and so the vehicle is worthless in terms of resale value. Hopefully, the car was taken by joyriders, and will be discovered abandoned in DC in the next few days. But on the other hand, if it was stolen to be disassembled for parts…
October 22nd, 2006 at 23:39
[…] This weekend I’ve been looking at cars, trying to find something to replace my stolen Acura without breaking the bank. Frankly, it’s not encouraging. The cars that I like are a bit too expensive; and the cars that I find affordable are, well… hard to like. Consider a 1998 Saturn for $1900 which I looked at earlier today. On the test drive, I recalled the opening scene Dead Souls, where two peasants are discussing a carriage: “What do you think, would this wheel make it to Moscow?” “It would.” “But I’d say it won’t make it all the way to Kazan’.” “No, it won’t.” Would the steering mechanism have made it to Maryland? Probably. But all the way to New York? Somehow, I doubt it… […]