118/365 Crime Doesn't Come From Nowhere

(Copied from South City Musings):

Musing aloud, the police captain wondered why this was happening here. I mentioned that word had been getting around that a certain apartment building a few blocks east was becoming a trouble spot. He then got this look on his face and said, "yeah, I keep getting these messages about it, but when my officers drive by, nothing's going on."

Seriously? Because every time I drive by, it's sketchy-city. Stoop sitters, people looking shiftily at cars going by, people walking up, people walking away, and so forth. And this is without doing any surveillance (which you might note on my blogger profile, is one of my interests). I can tell that building is bad news.

"He got to the end of the street and turned north on Grand?" the captain asks Nick again, who confirms it. "That's interesting." Then he says it's odd that he did that instead of going back to the territory he's familiar with (if he's from that problem property). I point out to him the HUGELY OBVIOUS FACT that all you can do is turn north on Grand at the end of our block due to a median, and while wrong way drivers happen, driving into traffic on a busy road like that isn't likely to happen regardless of the situation. He backpedals and then glances around our block.

"You don't even have any African-Americans living on your block," he points out, which I'm not sure how he could possibly determine since the whole block wasn't represented at this meeting of 4 neighbors and a satellite TV guy. But I agree that there aren't many, and then Nick points out that the Vince actually is probably biracial. I hadn't met him at that point. So then the captain focuses on that.

"Well, maybe they knew him. Maybe they'd been to his house, maybe to a party?"

We couldn't believe our ears. Seriously? Is this one of those "all black people know each other?" kind of bullshit? Are you really floating this as a theory?

Nick tells them, again, that Vince JUST MOVED IN, and that he's a doctor at a local hospital and he's from the west coast and it seems highly unlikely--nay, impossible--that he knew these hooligans in their muffler-less temporary-licensed probably-stolen car.

"Crime doesn't come from nowhere," the captain drones on. HELLO, we told you where we thought it was coming from. WHY ARE WE DOING YOUR JOB?