This weekend in our free town newspaper under the ''letters to the editor'' a guy had 4 double aluminum ladders stolen out of his yard and called everyone out on it, from neighbors who had to have noticed the folks drive up into his yard and load the ladders on a truck to the thieves themselves to the cops and scrap yard owners who may have taken these ladders in as scrap. To the cops he issues this - ''What are you doing about this?'' and to the yard owners this - '' If you take this in you have them on record please alert the police.'' He's correct in both of those statements. However, the problem with the police part in all this is simply that when the economy tanked police forces laid officers off and we were down to just a few it was I believe. Used to be a cop would cruise our neighborhood every hour on the hour. No more, you're lucky you even see them once a day now. When this all happened I said ''Watch, now petty crimes will go up everywhere because folks lost jobs, cant find jobs and know they probably wont get caught for crimes because there isn't enough police protection and time to devote to this.'' Well, its proving to be true. heck, we had a little old lady purse mugged in the parking lot of our local small grocery store! Unheard of stuff when I first moved to this town. Now, we have officers being added back in but not up to full force and ppl still don't have jobs so they steal. But that guy who wrote the article is correct but I have no idea if the police then went to all area yards and gave them a description of what had been stolen or not, if not then they either didn't care to put the time into that because of lack of time or what. It's all tied together - lost jobs, lost police force and brazen thieves. After the police force was cut the proof was in the ''Weekly criminal reports'' that used to number a handful and jumped to almost half a page. People like this are the ones who give ALL of us a bad name.
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