Starting this month 53 Division police will be hand-delivering pamphlets door to door in Leaside and Bennington Heights to warn us that we have to change our mentality to prevent crime.
Besides not locking doors, disabling alarms for nannies or otherwise making themselves vulnerable, says Staff-Sergeant Matt Moyer, Leasiders “often won’t call the police, even if they see something suspicious. They try to explain it away.”
Moyer says sometimes residents’ suspicions are well-founded and cites the recent phenomenon of thieves stealing high-end cars in Lawrence Park, and parking them in Leaside to see if they have GPS systems installed. If nobody claims the cars after a day or two, the thieves simply drive them away.
“We want people to know that if it [a situation] doesn’t fit, we want to hear about it. If a guy is sitting in a car at 2 a.m., we want to be told,” he says. “There is no bad call to police.”