For all my belly-aching about mountain lions, the thing that I legitimately worry most about while I'm out running trails is some *sshole breaking into my car at the trailhead while it's sitting there for a few hours in a remote rural area. You frequently see signs at trailheads warning you not to leave valuable in your cars, but it still ends up being an anxiety I'd rather not carry with me on trail, and I'm sure others out there feel the same.
So - is there such a thing as an online trailhead break-in map? Most of us have looked at city crime maps to see the distribution of violent and property crime and which street corners to stay away from, but what I'd really like to see is a trailhead break-in map with content input by users. Because the Oakland Police Department never put up such a system like Berkeley and other cities have, private citizens have created exactly this for Oakland. This would be great for trailheads - you would know which ones are really the most likely to be hit, you could tell when there's an uptick in a certain area, and it would be easy to see if there are certain areas generating a lot of car burglars, if the parks proximate to them are often hit. It would also be a good resource for EBRPD and EBMUD as well as the local police. Does anything like this exist already? Not just a Yahoo group, but an actual map. How hard would it be to set up?
One other possible use - I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone hanging around a parking area in the middle of the day behaving suspiciously, and a few times I've gone so far as to write the license plate down (I just did this tonight at Valle Vista staging area) - but of course I'm hesitant about making such information public because it could turn into a guilty-until-proven-innocent witch hunt. Any thoughts?
Good luck with that. Did you hear about the time Mike Palmer & Sheep's cars got broken into on a WEENIES run at Briones? Sheep made at least 4 calls to different Law Enforcement #s, getting passed from one to the other, because they couldn't figure out jurisdiction. I'm setting EBH3 on 2/22 in Las Trampas. Hope you & Megumi can make it.
ReplyDeleteOne of several incidents I was thinking about when I wrote this post.
ReplyDeleteI've had problems with jurisdictions too, and not even that far out in the boonies. Once I encountered a deep sinkhole in Claremont going up the hill (an actual hole), and got passed back and forth between Berkeley and Oakland, each of them insisting that it was the other guy's terrain. Eventually somehow it got fixed.