Metro takes aim at thieves targeting vacant homes

By Jackie Valley

Wednesday, June 22, 2011 | 1:55 a.m.

The man jaywalking recently near Vegas Drive and U.S. 95 fit the bill of someone police want to engage in conversation: He was carrying a backpack near a residential area and appeared nervous when approached by an officer.

Although he admitted to prior arrests, the man gave Metro Officer Corey Moon a fake name. Then he took off running, darting through a neighborhood and scaling gates and fences.

Police apprehended him several minutes later as he descended a block wall next to Tenaya Way.

“There was nothing in his bag to suggest he was breaking into people’s houses,” Officer Roberto Henderson said as police interrogated the now-handcuffed man. “But there was a warrant out for him, so we’re going to find out in a little while what that’s for.”

Turns out, the man was wanted for possession of a hypodermic device. Why he ran from police for a misdemeanor warrant is a mystery.

But the man, a self-proclaimed heroin addict, had been arrested for other offenses, including burglaries — the crime police are trying to curb in the northwest valley with targeted patrols. If a burglary occurred in the neighborhood about that time, police would start with him as a suspect.

The officers who apprehended the man are part of a new burglary reduction program in Metro’s Northwest Area Command. The goal: Cut burglaries by 20 percent compared with last year.

“One of the problems we are always contending with, and have for years, is burglaries,” Lt. Daniel Zehnder said. “The problem basically starts when you have heavy residential (areas) and a lot of people that are working families.”

Translation: Scores of empty homes during daytime hours. Add in a sour economy and a high foreclosure rate, and it makes the northwest valley ripe for burglaries.

Police declined to say how many burglaries have occurred the past few years in the northwest valley, but Zehnder said, “Anecdotally, we’ve seen an increase in burglaries because of the economy.” At least one occurs each day, he added.

Burglars run the gamut in terms of age, race, gender and overall appearance, Zehnder said.

One thing they have in common is the desire for quick cash.

“Although you can’t trust everything that comes out of a bad guy’s mouth, when he gets caught, a common refrain we hear is ‘I need the money,’ ” Zehnder said.

A man who recently burglarized an automobile while his wife and three children sat in his car told police he needed to feed his family, Zehnder said. Others seek money to support drug habits.

Although burglaries happen all over — gated communities, apartments, unattended homes — police said the greatest concentration tends to be in the southern end of the Northwest Area Command, an area dubbed the “Rainbow Corridor” because of Rainbow Boulevard running north-south down the middle.

To bring those numbers down, officers rely on “old-school police tactics,” Zehnder said.

Like police departments across the country, “technology started to separate us from the public we serve,” Zehnder said. Police became driven by calls for service and didn’t talk to the public as often, he said.

The burglary reduction program works the opposite way. Thirty percent of the northwest’s patrol officers dedicate themselves to burglary prevention during the day shift, seven days a week, Zehnder said.

Those officers only answer calls related to burglaries, otherwise, their mission is to patrol targeted areas prone to burglaries, he said.

Henderson drove through an aging neighborhood plagued by vacant houses near the Mirabelli Community Center one recent morning looking for suspicious activity: teens or adults carrying backpacks, people who appear nervous at the sight of a police car, salespeople going door to door.

Even so, police admit they can only do so much in terms of prevention. That’s why part of the success of the new initiative lies with residents communicating with officers and safeguarding their homes, police said.

“Our best chances are when neighbors are calling (about) suspicious people in their neighborhoods,” Henderson said. “As long as we get in the area in a short amount of time, we can catch these guys.”

The changing nature of neighborhoods since the economy’s collapse, however, makes that more challenging because people don’t know their neighbors and, as a result, might not notice irregularities as easily, Zehnder said.

“There is no such thing as a bad part of town anymore,” he said. “That crime has migrated because the people have migrated because the housing has diversified.”

Police urge residents to report suspicious activity, use their house alarms and close garages and lock doors.

Police also encourage residents to acknowledge their presence in the home even if it’s an unknown person at the door because many burglars knock before entering.

“We’ve seen it happen time and time and time again,” Henderson said.

A call to police from a neighbor about a possible 406 — police code for burglary — prompted Henderson and several other burglary patrol officers to swarm a residential street in the afternoon. The concern was a red pickup truck being filled with appliances at a vacant house.

This time it was a false alarm. A company had recently purchased the home, and the men in the red truck had been hired to clear the house. Paperwork proved it.

Still, Zehnder credits this “three-pronged approach” — proactively looking for burglars, a team of officers responding to burglaries in progress and officers communicating with the public — with helping decrease burglaries.

Burglaries have decreased 10 percent in the northwest valley compared with this time last year, Zehnder said. Week to week, burglaries are down as much as 30 percent since the program began in mid-March, he added.

Using a mapping software system, Zehnder meticulously tracks where burglaries occurred and where the burglary reduction officers roamed each day.

“With the exception of one incident, there’s never been a burglary that’s occurred where those guys are,” he said.

Police acknowledge that burglaries will never be nonexistent, but Zehnder hopes those numbers keep going down.

For burglars, “if you’re wandering through a neighborhood and every time you turn a corner, there’s a cop car driving by, (reasoning) tends to go, ‘You know what? This isn’t a good day for me,” Zehnder said.