Increase in violent crime

[Perry Winkle]

Originally Posted by Cyclefrance

A year or so back, while I was away on business, my wife was awoken by a noise outside around 1.00 am. She assumed it was our older son who has a habit of coming around at all hours to do something to his car (we have a handy motion detector floodlight on our drive - useful illumination to work by). She went outside and called:'Andrew is that you?' The talking she had heard stopped for a moment and then she noticed that the car the other side of the hedge wasn't our son's, so she promptly went back inside and locked the door. The car stayed put and she saw people (men - as they were men's voices she had heard) moving about still outside. She was quite frightened - we are in an isolated location - so she called the police and explained her concern (also that our son's TVR was parked at our place - a likely target). Police reaction: there are no patrols in the area, but call again if they attempt to enter the property. Nice. Luckily they moved off of their own volition about ten minutes later (god knows how she would have been able to defend herself if they had tried to enter). No violence, but it demonstrates the knub of the problem.

The same thing has happened a couple more times when I have been around. The last one involved a man literally walking around our property talking on his phone at 2.30 am. Even when we got up and put lights on he still stayed in our drive. That time the police did come - three cars (it must have been a quiet night!), arriving about ten seconds after he had sped away from our house in his car. They'd actually passed him, as they were coming in the opposite direction, but they didn't manage to relate a lone motorist driving fast from the direction of our property with possibly being linked to our intruder, so he was never apprehended.

I have a solution that my Dad taught me for taking care of obnoxious camp neighbors. It involves an old-school hockey/goalie mask and a chain-saw; let your imagination fill in the blanks.