Baltimore police make arrests and conduct undercover stings, even putting out "bait cars" with enticing electronic devices clearly visible on seat cushions, hoping to attract a criminal. One person can be responsible for hundreds of break-ins, so a single arrest can make an impact, even if it is short-lived and the suspect never gets charged with all of the crimes.
Tom Yeager, a retired city police major and vice president of the Downtown Partnership's Clean and Safe Program, says that every time car break-ins spike, he searches his list of longtime suspects and finds that at least one of them just got out of jail.
He calls car break-ins "our No. 1 big crime downtown."
His advice includes the obvious: Don't leave your GPS on the front seat. (Handicapped tags, which allow the possessor to park free in the city, also are hot items, but can't be concealed.)
It includes the less than obvious: Leaving your cigarette lighter out of its socket shows you own an electronic device and is an invitation to break in.
And removing the plastic arm that holds GPS or satellite radio devices and are suction-cupped to your windshield leaves a ring when you take it off - and yes, that is an invitation to break in and hunt around.
"When you leave your car, leave it empty," Yeager says. "There shouldn't be anything in your car but dust."
The Downtown Partnership tracks car break-ins and sends representatives to court with letters describing their impact - how "piles of broken glass" serve as grim reminders about crime, how victims tell friends who tell their friends and then more and more people choose to spend their weekends anywhere but Baltimore, about costs to insurance companies and the time wasted replacing lost items and making repairs, about the aggravation.
Nanci Gosnell found out the hard way when she brought two carloads of Cub Scouts from Bethesda to the National Aquarium this past weekend and got back to the garage and found two vehicles broken into and an iPod and a GPS missing from one. She called police, but the officer went to the wrong garage and she left believing the city to be both unsafe and unforgiving.
Gosnell's vehicle was broken into Friday night or early Saturday on South Street. The next day, just a few blocks away at a garage at 218 N. Charles St., a security guard for the Downtown Partnership saw a man emerge from a storage shed. He slowly steered the man to an armed guard who held him for police.
A man visiting from Rockville approached the officer and reported that his Honda Accord parked on Level D had been broken into and a Garmin GPS Navigator worth $325 had been taken. Court documents show that the officer searched the man who had been detained and found the device in his pocket.
Police then discovered that a Nissan Sentra also had been broken into, its glove box ransacked but nothing taken. Police charged the man they had arrested in those two break-ins.
His name: Michael D. Sydnor Jr.
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Read Peter's Baltimore Crime Beat blog at baltimoresun.com/crime
