Cell Phone Thief NE area (Albuquerque, Las Vegas: public school, university, taxes)

[CanManDan]

Not to hijack your thread or anything , but there isnt a day that goes by that someone comes up to me and says they are stranded and need gas money.........its getting ridiculous , everytime I get out of the car , someone approaches me. I would like to know which ones really needed the help but with so many I have to turn them all down

out

Dan

[anelizk]

Originally Posted by CanManDan

Not to hijack your thread or anything , but there isnt a day that goes by that someone comes up to me and says they are stranded and need gas money.........its getting ridiculous , everytime I get out of the car , someone approaches me. I would like to know which ones really needed the help but with so many I have to turn them all down

out

Dan

Happened to us a couple mos. back at the parking lot of the Best Buy near Hotel Circle.

[mike0421]

Originally Posted by anelizk

Happened to us a couple mos. back at the parking lot of the Best Buy near Hotel Circle.

It's happened to me no less than 3 times in the last month, most recently, last night.

[karmathecat]

The city has plenty of services available to people who truly need and WANT help. In addition to shelters, there are vouchers available for housing, etc. You're being hit up by people who want to buy drugs/alcohol with your money.

[yukon]

Those requests for cash because they're stranded/out of gas/whatever? I'm starting to see the same people over and over, about 75% of the time now.

[anelizk]

Well when it happened to me, I turned down the person. I told them I didn't carry cash or coins on me...more than anything b/c it's true. But I have to say I was used to this kinda thing having lived in EP also.

Not to change the subject but in getting back to the cell phone incident, I think I should address something that needs some clarifying & feedback. When we reported the incident I have to comment on how resigned I felt the police officer's attitude was & how quick to tell us "well I'm very sorry for this, but the perp isn't likely to be caught nor the phone returned."

We didn't give a cr!$ about the phone, it was the fact that a blatant thieving criminal is allowed to roam free. I realize that is the reality of petty crime like this, but petty crime leads to more violent crime. It seems like there's a need for a grass roots effort in ABQ for folks to band together to start petitioning police, city council, & it's legislators to get tougher on crime.

[berncohomes]

The problem this city has is that the police do not have enough money. We have a sprawling city with very few police officers to cover it.

I remember talking with an officer once, it was in the week, middle of the afternoon and he confessed because of vacation time and sick time he was the ONLY officer on duty for his section, can't quite remember his exact area, but it was huge. We can't blame the officers on the street, they can only do so much.

Albuquerque voters were willing to pass bonds for UNM :

$139.9 Million- Higher Education and Special School Facilities

$4 million for the University of New Mexicos new Film & Digital Media Facility located at Mesa del Sol
$12 million for Central New Mexico Community Colleges Westside campus
$19.8 million for New Mexico State Universitys Arts Complex
$57.8 Million for Health-Related Facilities
$17 million for UNMs Cancer Research & Treatment Center
$7 million for UNMs Dental Residency Phase I
$10 million for New Mexicos Behavioral Health Institute in Las Vegas
$14.7 Million for Senior Citizen Facilities and Equipment
$1.6 Million for Barelas Senior Center
$ 899,600 for Taos Pueblo Senior Center
$600,000 for Mora/Wagon Mound Senior Center
$11 Million for Library Acquisitions
$3 million for public school libraries
$3 million for public libraries
$3 million for academic libraries
$2 million for tribal libraries

If we can afford to pay more taxes for something UNM to make profit on, surely we can increase our taxes to make our streets safer.

[ziaAirmac]

Originally Posted by berncohomes

The problem this city has is that the police do not have enough money. We have a sprawling city with very few police officers to cover it....

berncohomes is dead on with this one. I spoke to a veteran officer while reporting some vandalism on our street and he said the best deterrent was random, regular street patrols. Something APD can't begin to consider at this point.

If the officer that responded to the cell thief incident seemed uncaring, understand that he wanted to stop crime as much as you want it stopped. You don't end up in uniform and work the kind of shifts they do because you don't care. It's just massive overload. They could put everything they have into a shift for the city and it won't make a scratch in the problem. Same goes for corrections. There's just so much more need then ability to provide. It becomes a game of controlling your personal resources to maintain your sanity and energy to work the next shift.

It doesn't help to make the laws tougher when your prisons are packed and there aren't enough officers to enforce it anyway. Random, regular street patrols are an efficiency like preventative medicine. By building the belief in many petty criminal and vandal minds that it's fairly likely they might be caught, you deter them from getting into the 'system'. It's something that's working for the officers in the background without them having to actually put cuffs on someone, show up in court or write reports.

Right now even the recent pushes for increases in manpower are inflated because many of the officers brought in were veteran officers being called back to fill administrative positions, not add to street coverage/schedules. The city has to decide if it's ready to grow up. I think there's a part of Albuquerque's consciousness that actually likes that we're still a bit 'wild west'. We don't necessarily want an APD cruiser up and down our street all the time. You can't have it both ways. And what's the good of being the 'green & bicycle friendly' city that the marketing is pushing for if some homeless meth head is pissing on your xeriscaping, gangbangers are tagging your new retail and someone ripped off your bike?

I'm with berncohomes. Get enough officers on the street to deter petty crime. There's probably benefits to be had in the quality of policing if the officers aren't overworked as well.

[mike0421]

I think it comes down to supply and demand. The bottom line is that more people are moving into ABQ than are moving out. If there was a mass exodus, and it was determined that crime was the major contributing factor, there would have to be a change when it comes to law enforcement and philosophy. But people just keep on coming in spite of the high crime numbers. I doubt there will be a change any time soon.

[mrgoodwx]

I know someone who is an officer with UNM PD. He tells me they lost all of their budget for any overtime, can't afford equipment and supplies they need...that kind of thing. But hey...at least we have the money to pay the UNM president and his cronies over $1 million in bonuses on top of their already-tidy salaries, and a couple of them are drawing retirement checks from the state. Let's continue to sweep any crime problems under the rug and pretend we're in nirvana.