Take this advice for what you will.

As an informal observation from someone who reads the area’s police reports, I can tell you that if there’s one crime I’d bet is ballooning, it’s vehicle prowling. I have no data (yet) to back up this assumption, but we’ve been seeing waves of prowls in Bremerton, Silverdale, Port Orchard, Poulsbo and other Kitsap areas.

Keep in mind these thieves are opportunistic. If they see nothing inside worth taking, they’ll probably move on. That’s the biggest tip I can give you: don’t leave anything in a vehicle that can’t live without.

One library employee of the Sylvan Way branch was lucky last week. Bremerton Detective Sgt. Randy Plumb felt two women in the area were up to no good. Sure enough, he returned to the parking lot a short time after seeing them and a car’s window had been broken, the purse inside it gone.

Plumb tracked down the women on a hunch and arrested them at K-Mart. But rest assured our community doesn’t have crime fighters on every block, all the time. That’s the worst thing about prowling: it’s a hard crime to catch, and hard to prosecute.

Rather than thinking about prosecuting, we should focus on prevention. So no more purses, no more wallets, no more valuables left inside vehicles that don’t have to be. Remember the words of infamous bank robber Willie Sutton.

When asked why he robbed banks, he replied simply: “Because that’s where the money is.”

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Here’s a crime with a happy ending: a Bremerton woman who tracked down her GPS device after it was stolen from her car.

How’d she get it back, you ask?

Astrid, 29, went over to her local pawn shop.

A friend of hers had recommended she do so after her Magellan Roadmate was taken from her car overnight in early November.

She’d been soured by the theft, the second time her GPS had been taken from her car (she says her husband had forgotten to lock it).

When she went to the pawn shop to see if thieves had sold it there, an employee said she needed the GPS’ serial number. Thankfully, she still had it on the box it came in.

She gave the number to the employee, who checked their inventory on a computer.

“As soon as he hit the enter key,” she said, “His eyes grew bigger.”

The simple lesson here is that checking one place, she got her property back. Even attempting to have the insurance cover it — adding in what could be a costly deductible — would have been more complicated.

And Astrid not only got her GPS device back, but she helped the police cease — at least temporarily — other thefts.

How, you ask?

An officer went to the pawn shop and found out who sold the GPS device. He then went to that man’s house, and after finding out he had help, two people were arrested, and will be prosecuted for it.

So in this short tale are three lessons:

1. lock up your stuff;

2. keep the serial numbers of your stuff;

3. if your stuff gets stolen, conduct some simple due diligence (file a police report and check area pawn shops).

Blogger’s Note: To read a similar success story, click here to learn about a Silverdale man who got his GPS device back too.

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