I gifted myself some nifty night-vision game cameras for Christmas. We have a few houses that are awaiting renovation, and so I thought it would be nice to monitor the properties in some way, in case people messed with it. I got the batteries, the SD cards, the cameras themselves... but I forgot to order the mounts. I've been busy and haven't gotten around to ordering the mounts or setting them up in place.

Yesterday, I was hanging out waiting for my plumber. (Yeah, the bill was so high, that one got hand-delivered, but that's another story...) A police car had followed me from school to the plumber's driveway, and the officer got out.

"Hey, I know you sometimes employ the X family," he said. The X family is the people in town that everyone hates. One of my houses is next door to one of their houses. (I'd bought it early on, before I knew anything about local reputations or the difference between "poor" vs "undesirable".) One member of the X family has made an enormous effort to actually go straight, and I give him low-skilled work, periodically, to help keep him on the straight and narrow. But when I hire him, he usually brings in a few relatives to help him out--- and those relatives are NOT on the straight and narrow. I'd much rather he didn't--- but it is what it is for now.

Anyhow-- "I know you employ the X family sometimes. Are they doing work for you now at [address]?"

"No, I haven't had any work for them there since before Christmas," I said.

"I thought I had seen [my guy's brother]'s van parked in your driveway there last night. The house was all lit up and everything."

"DH has been doing the floors the last several nights, but he wasn't working there last night. He leaves the lights on--" I was going to say "Because the floors are wet" but the officer said, "--So we can see inside the house when we drive by! Very clever!"

"I'll probably have the X family haul in some dirt in a week or two," I said. "But no, I haven't had them there since before Christmas." They'd replaced a fence for me just last week, but that was somewhere else.

I thought it was just the PD being neighborhood watch-y, and I thought it was really sweet for him to recognize me, chase me down, and strike up a conversation to make sure all was okay. It didn't make any sense that anyone was parked in that driveway--- I didn't quite catch the sequence of manuevers, but ultimately, the officer had lost him-- but that was nice they were keeping their eyes open.

Today, I'm glancing through FB, and I see a bunch of posts from yesterday morning. It's asking about what the police are doing over by the gas station/bank on Main St, and they've got the parking lots roped off, etc. It turns out, the grapevine sez that some guy from a local town had gotten "shot by the X family over smokes", not clarified as to whether it was the legal or illegal kind, and he was currently in the hospital for the removal of the bullet.

Anyhow, that made the effort of the previous day's interaction make a whole lot more sense. They had tentatively pinned the X family to the scene, and were either breaking alibis ("I'm doing work for her!") or were eliminating legitimate reasons as to why they were there.

But-- long story short-- if I'd ordered my brackets like I should have, and had gone through the effort of mounting up my game camera on the premises, I could have at least have had positive photographic evidence of who was on the property that night.

Thank you for sharing Deanna.

I currently have cameras in the window of my farm property because of a thief.

The cameras I have will not zoom and do not appear to be very good quality for identifying faces.

Wow! We have several local "crime families," that are always causing trouble. There is an active effort to run one clan out of town that specializes in renting houses they don't own and giving "long haul" rides to tourists in their taxi company.

How do you get so bad that hundreds of people want you gone or in jail? There's actually a FB group devoted to tracking them. The cab companies are all in a war against them. They literally are in court every week. Oh yeah, the kicker - two weeks ago an old man died in a trailer fire they were renting out, apparently a sub-let.

LTD, my thief was just recently on that face book site with pictures of him steeling tools out of a guys truck at Lowes.

Deanna,

I was going to write a witty response but I’ll just do it later. :)

True. Police small talk is investigating.