Shawn Vestal: Even if it’s just another ho-hum car prowling, report it to the cops

It happened Monday night for roughly the 10th time in the 20 years I’ve lived in Spokane.

Someone broke into my car, which was parked on the street outside our home on the lower South Hill.

My car was not locked – by some combination of strategery and forgetfulness – and there was little of value inside – my son’s new basketball, a travel mug for coffee, registration documents and a couple of parking tickets from the past year. Because it was unlocked, what I found on Tuesday morning was not the glitter of shattered window glass on the pavement, but simply a car interior that seemed much more disorganized than usual.

Registration and insurance papers and a coffee stamp card strewn about. A pair of my wife’s mittens from the glove box and a bunch of crumpled napkins that had been stashed in the cubby were tossed about. A few items of paperwork, a notebook and a couple of pens, an empty tin of mints.

A winter coat of my wife’s, tucked under a seat after a day of skiing, was overlooked, it seemed.

All in all, for what has come to be my biennial brush with Spokane’s signature crime, I called it a win.

But I didn’t call it in.

That was also true of the ninth time my car was broken into more than a year ago, as well – another instance of the car being unlocked with nothing to take.

In every previous instance – the two times when I lived in Browne’s Addition way back when, the time it happened downtown parked near the Review Building, and the rest of the occasions in Cliff-Cannon – I reported it because a window had been smashed, and I needed a police report so my insurance would pay for a replacement. In those cases, I also lost property that I had foolishly left inside the car, from a CD collection to an old iPod – to note only the antique music technologies.

But even though I didn’t lose anything or suffer any damage this time around, I should have reported this week’s incident anyway – so the cops can track crime. It’s true that police won’t send a unit over to investigate the rifling-through-papers of my car. But if they know it happened, it helps them create a more accurate picture of crime in the city, identify clusters of crimes, and decide where to deploy resources, said Sgt. Terry Preuninger of the Spokane Police Department.

“It’s the way we know where to put cops,” Preuninger said.

In terms of our city’s crime profile, vehicle break-ins are really us. We don’t have tons of violent crime. We have lots of relatively low-level property crime. It’s a sneaky, desperate underside of the poverty-slash-addiction-slash-lifetime-petty-criminal dynamic that is a real and unfortunate component of the community.

This isn’t new, and whether it’s gotten better or worse recently depends a lot on where you live. In my neighborhood, it was much worse several years ago than it has been recently – shattered auto glass on the asphalt was a constant sight.

Overall numbers are unreliable because vehicle prowlings are lumped in with larceny overall in the city’s crime statistics, and lots of people do what I did; if there isn’t a personal cost, they don’t report.

(A brief tangent: Our overall crime reports are down in the past year, and robustly so. This is true downtown, as well, though people who like to conflate homelessness and crime often argue that this is simply because people have stopped reporting crimes. If this is true, it must be true primarily for crimes akin to my car break-in – property crimes in which there is no loss to recoup through insurance. And there is nothing new whatsoever about frustrations over the inability of police to respond to property crimes. That goes back simply years and years.)

Leaving the car unlocked and free of valuable goods is a strategy that lots of people employ. Preuninger hears it a lot. He also hears from people who left their cars unlocked to defuse a break-in, only to have the car itself stolen.

He understands why people frustrated with constant break-ins might leave their cars unlocked, though he makes sure to lock up his car to try and protect his property, and to make things more difficult for thieves, he said.

In any case, though, people ought to let police know about break-ins. Even if nothing is damaged or taken. Even if it feels – as it feels to me this week – as if I dodged a broken window, which has come to feel like an unavoidable consequence of being a street parker in Spokane.

“It really is helpful to the community in the long run to report crimes to the police,” he said. “It may not seem like it, but the numbers really do get used.”

He talked me into it. I called Crime Check.