Crime Time Review

For the past fifteen years I've lived in the city of Cincinnati proper. For the first time in all of those years I was actually a crime victim. It was a crime of opportunity that involved a loose van window and an attractive target on the front seat - it was almost asking for it - and it pales in comparison with what is read in the news (or what blogger Nick Spencer has reported over the months running a business in Over-the-Rhine).

Times like this, though, are a chance to know your credit card companies on a very intimate basis. Does the average representative in the Ivan Pavlov memorial call center have any idea how to handle a call once the customer says something like "please cancel my card to prevent fraud"? Nope! As usual when you deal with institutional CSRs, English is a second language and competence is optional.

The tale can be told in a series of gas station transactions, and any thief worth his salt knows you only have a limited number of hours to make use of your plastic quarry. It's kind of a race between corporate incompetence and criminal malfeasance. Somewhere there's a thief with a full tank of gas, a pocket full of trucker speed and a backseat spilling over of Frito-Lay's finest. They would have probably made a sizable investment in alcohol too, but I think they had stopped selling by the time of the robbery.

If I understand correctly, it's the merchants and the credit card companies who will ultimately be buying those stolen goods. In every one of those gas stations there are video cameras and a detailed record of when Charlie Cutpurse swiped the card. How hard would it be to match those two things together and fax a video capture to the cops? Maybe I'm looking for a technological solution to a problem with social roots, but frankly I don't really care.

Does it make me an insensitive conservative because I think thieves who break into vehicles should be caught and thrown in jail? At the end of the day I am more amused than annoyed - but I've discovered I'm really in favor of law enforcement. The Cincinnati cop who showed up last night was a real gem (I've met my share of losers). Of all of the folks involved in last night's transaction I'd say it was the thief and the cop that get the highest professional marks for effectively executing thier particlar roles. As crime victims we get a 'C' -- we've re-learned some things that should be obvious about vehicle windows. And I'm giving the financial institutions a 'D' for the usual bumbling corporate idiocy.