I've been thinking about moving back to San Francisco, which means I've also been thinking, again, about the particular flavor of crime that comes with living there. Specifically: I'm reinstalling the security cameras I used to have on the front of my house, and one of the new ones I've already put up doesn't do a good job at night. That's a problem, because on the hill where I live, night is exactly when it matters.
I used to have a camera that recorded well in the dark, and it actually caught a couple of perpetrators in the act. Over the years I've come to recognize two distinct operations, and they are not the same crime at all.
The bike crew. This is the more common one on my street. Two guys, working in pairs, one on each side of the road. They've got backpacks for hauling whatever they find, and they're pushing bikes rather than riding them — bikes that, this being San Francisco, are probably stolen themselves, since that's its own epidemic here. They move down the street in parallel, checking car doors as they go, usually the door closest to the sidewalk because it's the easiest to reach without drawing attention. If you forgot to lock your car — and it happens — they go through everything. Glove box, center console, anything left out in the open. I'd guess they'd check the trunk too, except they're trying to be quiet, so they open the door and don't close it back. That's actually the tell: you wake up, look outside, and see your car door — or your neighbor's — cracked open, dome light sometimes still on. I imagine the bikes aren't just for hauling loot; they're also the getaway plan. My street is steep, and if a homeowner confronts them, they can be gone in seconds.
This has happened to me more than once, and every time it's because I either forgot to lock the door or talked myself out of bothering — telling myself there was nothing valuable in the car anyway. That reasoning is a mistake. It's not really about what they take. It's the specific unpleasantness of walking outside in the morning and realizing your car was gone through while you slept twenty feet away. So now I make it a point to lock the door every night, and I'm recruiting my son to help me upgrade the cameras so we actually get usable footage of these guys.
The window smashers. This is the operation I've seen with my own eyes, and it's a different animal entirely. I was parked near the Cliff House — a tourist spot on the north side of the city with a few parking lots — just sitting in my car on my phone, when another car pulled up behind me and boxed in the car next to mine. It was full of young guys, and the car itself had been, in the local vernacular, “murdered out”: windows blacked out, plates removed. Three or four people inside. One got out with a tool for breaking car windows, popped the window on the car next to me, reached in, grabbed whatever was there, and tossed it back to his crew before they all took off.
Having watched that happen up close, my advice to anyone — resident or visitor — is simple: don't intervene. Don't even take a video. These guys look and act like people who are armed, and nothing sitting in your car is worth your life. If it happens right in front of you, the correct response is to stand there and watch.
That advice isn't hypothetical for me. I've had my own rear window smashed and an iPad stolen — my son had tossed it in the back seat when I dropped him off, and I later parked near a truck rental facility for a few hours. Came back to a shattered window and no iPad. The rental facility clearly had cameras aimed right at that spot, so I asked the manager if he'd pull the footage. He flatly refused. I understand the instinct — nobody wants to get pulled into this, and given what I saw at the Cliff House, I get why. But it meant there was simply no path to figuring out who did it.
Which gets at the last point I want to make, and it's the least satisfying one: even when you do capture these guys on camera, it doesn't lead anywhere. San Francisco PD has bigger problems than property crime, and reasonably so — I'm not going to pretend they should drop everything for a break-in. I posted footage of the bike-crew guys who've hit my street, and nothing came of it. Nothing ever does. So the cameras aren't really about solving the crime. They're about understanding what's actually happening on my own block — which, it turns out, is still worth knowing, even if the video never leads to an arrest.