Students not happy with police response

For students who live in Oakland, burglaries and robberies have lately become all too common… For students who live in Oakland, burglaries and robberies have lately become all too common occurrences – reminders that the neighborhood is part of a big city whose residents aren’t always as honest as their friends and classmates.

It seems that nearly everyone knows someone who has had their laptop, television or PlayStation stolen from their less-than-secure apartment at one time or another.

Jake Patterson returned home from a Pitt basketball game Tuesday night to find the door of his third floor apartment on Ward Street kicked in and around $3,500 worth of his stuff gone.

“I saw the door hanging open, and I got that feeling of ‘oh crap,'” Patterson said.

Over winter break, Adam Sharrow returned from work around 5 p.m. to his apartment on North Dithridge Street only to discover his laptop missing and his window wide open.

Sharrow said the city police officer who responded to his call told him not to get his hopes up and that the chances of him seeing his stuff again were pretty slim.

In Patterson’s case, the city police crime scene unit didn’t even show up and told him the scene probably didn’t have the right kind of evidence, he said.

After filing his initial report, Sharrow said he never even heard from the crime scene investigators. In fact, Sharrow hasn’t heard anything from city police since the incident occurred.

“They showed up,” Sharrow said. “I guess that’s good.”

Patterson expressed similar sentiments.

“I’m sure [the city police] have bigger fish to fry,” he said. “I got the impression from them that it’s just not that big of a deal.”

Patterson may be right, according to city police Zone 4 spokesman Matthew White.

“Everything is prioritized,” White said. ” If you’re just making a report, you wait. It could be a couple hours before we get there.”

White said that the city crime scene unit works the same way.

“They work with homicides and rapes first, not property crimes,” he said.

White explained that burglary reports follow a specific chain of command that begins with the patrol officer who takes the report.

The patrol officer then enters the report into the department’s main computer where it is forwarded to the burglary detective’s office and, if necessary, to the crime scene unit.

“The burglary detectives will be in touch [with the victim] in a day or two,” White said. “Sometimes the crime scene unit gets stuff, sometimes not.”

White admitted that burglary victims seldom recover their stolen property. If a thief attempts to unload the goods at a pawn shop, he must present identification and fill out a form which is then filed with the police department, White said.

“Unless [the thief] sells it through a pawn dealer, chances are it’s gone. They sell it to someone on the street.” White said. “They’re not concerned with making money, they just need enough for a fix – either crack or heroin.”

According to the Pennsylvania Uniform Crime Reporting System, Pittsburgh city police solved only 21.9 percent of the burglaries reported to them last year – a figure White said is misleading.

“Just because there’s a low arrest rate doesn’t mean there’s a low clearance rate,” he said. “A lot of times, we catch somebody for something else, they talk to us and say they’re strung out on crack and they’ve done 300 [burglaries].

“By the time we figure it out, victims have moved, especially in the case of college students. It could be six months to a year later, and they would have to come back here to prosecute, and they don’t, so it gets dropped.”

As far as preventing burglaries is concerned, White puts the responsibility squarely on residents.

“People who live in Oakland are their own worst enemies,” White said. “They know the window locks are broken, they prop apartment doors open to let the pizza guy in or they have sets of lost keys floating around with address labels on them.”

White urged residents to take charge of their own home security and use common sense.

“We can’t be everywhere at once,” he said.