| The saga of our BLM sign |
[May. 21st, 2018|08:49 pm]
Judy Anderson (yduJ)
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As I mentioned on Twitter, we got a Black Lives Matter sign a month ago. It lasted a week before it was stolen. The sad thing is that it's next to a sign that says "Hate has no home here". Apparently hate DOES have a home here after all... We buy another sign, and a spare. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Once, the thief does it in broad daylight, and the neighbors see it! They called the cops, though they didn't manage to get the license plate so there wasn't much to do. We hadn't called the cops before, because we were worried they'd think it was antagonistic. The officer seemed completely fine with it, we mentioned that "just because we want to save the whales doesn't mean we want to torpedo the dolphins", and he laughed. So, that was good.
So we bought a deer camera, which is cheaper and easier to deploy than a real webcam, plus it's hardened against weather, and comes in camo. It takes still photos based on a motion detector and has night vision mode.
Sign #4 is stolen! We get photos! Unfortunately, the license plate is overexposed so it can't be read. The cops (who we did call, since they'd already been involved) take our thumb drive with photos and say they'll have their image enhancing expert work on it. I was all hot to post the pictures immediately, but the cops suggested that we should wait for a while before posting them, because if we did it immediately and the thief saw the pictures, they might figure out where the camera was mounted and come steal it as well as sign #5.
Surprisingly, a week later the cops posted some of the pictures on facebook with "do you recognize this truck". Crowdsourcing the investigation, and I guess compromising our camera location. Without asking us. Oh well. Even more surprisingly, the thieves turned themselves in! We think they were concerned that if someone saw their truck (which is somewhat distinctive) and turned them in, it would be worse for them than turning themselves in. However, they denied stealing the other signs. This is a credible theory, because the car the neighbors saw was a sedan, not a pickup truck.
Currently we're taking the sign and the camera in at night, since we thought the photos wouldn't be useful without ability to get the license plate. Though, at least in this case the license plate was unnecessary. The camera is also a power hog so we're burning through non-rechargeable batteries.
The saga is ongoing; will we have to catch every punk kid in our town? We still have a few signs...
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