Prioritizing police resources, this chief is doing it wrong:
On Jan. 11, Meehan son, a freshman at Berkeley High School, found that his iPhone, equipped with the Find My iPhone tracking software, was gone from his unlocked gym locker. The boy alerted his father and Meehan pulled out his own cell phone and showed a property crimes detective sergeant the real time movement of the stolen phone.
Given the active signal of the stolen phone, the detective sergeant took his team to try to locate it. As the signal was moving into the city of Oakland, the detective sergeant called the drug task force to ask for some additional assistance and members of that team offered to help, said Sgt. Mary Kusmiss, department spokeswoman.
Meehan did not respond to a request for comment.
The four sergeants followed the signal to the area of 55th and San Pablo avenues in North Oakland, where they contacted residents at several homes looking for the phone. It was never located.
I’m not sure what the real story is here. Is it the fact a police chief used an great deal of department resources to find his kid’s stolen phone or the fact that said resources couldn’t find the phone even though they had a blue dot on a map telling them where it was?
You also have to love how the drug task force got pulling into this investigation. Perhaps this was done by expanding the interpretation on civil forfeiture laws. If the burdon of proof is placed on citizens to demonstrate anything they own hasn’t been tied to a drug crime then the burdon of proof must be placed on a phone thief to prove it wasn’t stolen in relation to a drug crime. On the upside the drug task force was busy hunting down a stolen phone instead of kicking in the door of some random homehold and shooting any dog they found inside only to find out they were at the wrong address again.