When victims report the property crimes to police agencies, they get ho-hum responses and little hope for reasonably quick recovery--even though most stolen vehicles eventually are abandoned on side streeets and remain undiscovered for weeks or months.
Victims meanwhile have to notify their insurance companies, make arrangements for alternate temporary transportation and try to find comparable replacement vehicles with insurance settlements that rarely match actual values.
Police agencies routinely give vehicular theft a low priority, citing the need to use limited personnel to counter violent crimes. There is a solution to the manpower problem, however, available for mere fractions of the amounts now spent on law enforcement:
Financially reward cab drivers for reporting occupied or unoccupied stolen vehicles listed on hot sheets, felony crimes in progress, felons pictured on wanted circulars and drunken or reckless drivers.
Pay nominal finder's fees or bounties for accurate cabbie information resulting in recoveries or apprehensions by police. Cabs, after all, use two-way radios and operate in most metropolitan areas around the clock every day of the week.
The cost would be considerably less than the combined salary and benefits of just one rookie police officer. But the dividends would be astronomical.
Let cabbies hack crime. (18 JULY 1999)
