Some people refuse to read comments on online news stories, for myriad reasons: No time; no interest; the suspicion that all comment sections are like the ones on “anything goes” sites, toxic pits of profanity and insults. While some comments might seem like time-wasters, an amazing amount of WSB’ers use comments to add helpful information, both during breaking/developing stories, and sometimes on stories that are days old, like this one from last Monday about neighbors hit by burglars. Since even regular comment-readers don’t tend to go back and check older stories, we wanted to highlight the followup that just appeared in that story’s comment section:
Thank you everyone for the helpful information. Even though we’ve been burglarized, we still love West Seattle, and it is unlikely that these burglaries are isolated to West Seattle. Wherever there are items that can be pawned or hawked on Craigslist, there’s some thief that wants them.
Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned since the burglary (along with a few opinions of our own).
As a neighborhood, we need to coordinate our efforts. We will plan to contribute.
We have heard lots of stories about how Craigslist seems to be fueling this problem. Let’s start getting the word out that until Craigslist puts in some security measures to deter thieves from selling our stuff, it is little more than an online black market and pawn shop.
From what we’ve heard and read, there is a fairly serious mail theft problem in West Seattle. Best thing to do is to lock your mailbox or get a P.O. box.
Serial numbers are helpful to the police, take an hour and go through your electronics and write down the serial numbers and store them somewhere online so they can be included with police reports.
An audible (external) alarm or a dog is a very good deterrent to burglary.
We’ve also heard that people sometimes don’t report the issue even when they see it or hear it. As a neighborhood, we should be reporting to police when we hear audible alarms and barking dogs or anything that sounds like it could be really bad.
After this experience, we’re absolutely convinced that suspicious soliciting (such as our Comcast visitor) or loitering activities (such as the type we’ve read about here on the other WSB burglary postings) should be reported immediately to the police (not hours later, immediately). We will be doing our part by calling the police on suspicious solicitors and ask them to come out and check their credentials.
We’ll keep checking in here, we really appreciate the helpful information, and we hope that sharing what we’ve learned since our burglary will help others to prevent it from happening to them.
(Note: CL has an official policy banning sales of stolen property.) We have long said, WSB doesn’t have “readers,” it has collaborators. Comments are a simple form of collaboration; sending information (here’s how), from event listings to photos to Crime Watch reports and much more, is another way. But even if you “only” read, you are still collaborating, by seeking and using information. Thank you.
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