Last night, we get a call from someone reporting a suspicious guy looking in a car in a light industrial area of town.  Most of that area is closed after business hours.  My coworker dispatches two officers and they find the guy- near an unlocked car that has it’s keys in it.  But it’s not his car and he’s a local homeless guy who had his own car/home.  The officer asks me to call the owner of the other car to find out why it’s there and if they know who should be driving it.  I wake up the owner (we do this a lot and it’s always a good time!!)  and she says that her son (adult) was supposed to have the car.  Well, in looking for her number, I had already come across her son’s name in our county wide records system.  He had quite a lengthy arrest record.  The officer, having released the homeless guy and asked him to move on, was beginning to wrap things up and clear the scene; which is another story- why do they ask us to do things then not wait for the thing they asked us to do and clear the scene?  Grr. 

Anyway- my little, non-cop-trained brain said that the officer probably shouldn’t clear this call just yet.  I had him call in to say that he the owner’s little boy who had his mommy’s car was not a good boy.  He had no reason to be in our town.  Who leaves their car unlocked and keys inside anyway??  The officer decided that maybe he’d stick around out of sight and see what happens.   Shortly, Bad Boy comes out of hiding and officers do too- find he was indeed prowling the nearby school district maintenance  yard.  But not only that.  It turns out that he had, on his naughty little person, diagrams of all our schools and access points into the computer labs.  Go figure!

That is one of the fun things about my job.  It doesn’t happen often, but when all the pieces come together and we’re actually at the right place at the right time and when citizens actually pick up the phone to report that odd thing, we earn our keep.  And our kids had their computers today.