FEKKIN' CRACKHAEDS!!!

[Aggie]

.....smashed my car window in (and 3 other cars in the parkade) to rifle through it looking for loose change and valuable. 

If there was actually something worth stealing in there or visible valuables, I would be a little less pissed off about it - but there was NOTHING so it was straight vandalism & will cost around $250 to fix.  They just opened up the glove box etc. and left the car alone otherwise.  I've had break-ins before when I had the Firefly, but it had a bum window that allowed a determined miscreant to open it without doing permanent damage.  $250 damage on the off chance there might be a couple of bucks in parking change kicking around in the console. 

The idiotstick that parks beside us left his leather jacket and i-pod in his (old, crappy) BMW, got smashed & grabbed, and wants to ask the apartment management to pay damages due to poor lighting or some such nonsense.  They just had all the parkade doors rekeyed last week - security ain't great there, but LIGHTS won't do a damned thing except make your i-pod more visible.    Cameras, maybe (the front door camera is visible from any cable TV in the building, that kind of system might help).

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Sorry to hear. 

[Griffin NoName]

Sometimes I wonder if we have the definition of species right.

I can't imagine any mindset in which I wouldn't be too concerned for the stress and infringrment on others to carry out this kind of crime.

I suppose it's been around for ever and stone-age man was constantly getting the tools he taken ages to make stolen and his cave trashed?

[Aggie]

I can't imagine any mindset in which I wouldn't be too concerned for the stress and infringrment on others to carry out this kind of crime.

It's a drug-addled and dependent one, for sure.  Maybe I'm coming down too hard on the crackheads - it's just as likely to be meth these days*.  Where we live is relatively quiet, but is only a few blocks from a Bad Corner.  But you've hit on the issue - it's the relative damage:gain ratio that pisses me off.  Still better than violent crime, I suppose.


*yes, there's a larger issue here; no, I ain't interested in it at the moment. 

[Scriblerus the Philosophe]

Agreed, Aggie. I've seen druggies (one that I knew, actually. She used to be my neighbor) digging through dumpsters for recyclables. If she'd stoop to digging through the trash at a place she used to live at, then it'd be the  crack heads or the tweakers*.

Sorry, Aggie.


*meth users

[Aggie]

Agreed, Aggie. I've seen druggies (one that I knew, actually. She used to be my neighbor) digging through dumpsters for recyclables. If she'd stoop to digging through the trash at a place she used to live at, then it'd be the  crack heads or the tweakers*.

The recyclers, bottle-pickers and dumpster-divers actually get my respect.  Especially the dumpster-divers; we have a few regulars who I suspect are more or less professionals, and probably not homeless - from the little I've chatted with them they seem to be regular dudes with an irregular form of self-employment.  The bottle-picking lot seems largely presumably homeless alcoholics, drug addicts and/or mentally ill people who are surviving the best they can on it, but there's a fair contingent of Chinese grandmothers in rubber gloves.  I love 'em all for doing a job that you probably couldn't hire anyone to do, and for (at least in the downtown core) keeping more recyclables out of the landfill than everyone else combined.  It's an honourable living, if a tough one, IMHO. 

But these smashy types?  Different story.  Breaking shit is NOT urban foraging.

[Sibling Chatty]

A friend who lives in a downtown lofn in Houston...a REAL old building one, not a fakey-loft new place with security and all, has a sign in his car that says NOTHING OF VALUE, CAR NOT LOCKED. Under that it says 'Please do not break glass'.

He usually parks near a one-block square "park" that's built over a parking garage. There are homeless/transient guys that pretty much live in the park and parking garage, and he's gotten to know them. They watch out for his car, keep the bums from sleeping in it, and even came and got him the night a city bus clipped the rear end of it.

He buys them a couple of six-packs on Saturday night and refills their big Igloo water container for them every day. He's the ONLY one in his 12 loft building that has never had a window broken.

Y'all need a live in homeless guy...