The Las Vegas police (only tangentially related to poker)

My car was stolen August 10 from the Hilton parking lot while I was inside playing poker. This rant is about how the local police handled the whole thing.

The Hilton security guy filled out his forms and called the police for me. They took a bunch of information over the phone, then asked me to wait there until an officer could come by to complete the incident report. After an hour, nobody had showed up, so the security guy suggested that they probably had all the information they needed, and I could just call them the next morning to be sure. Sounded like a good idea to me.

Wrong. When I called the next day to tell them about nobody showing up to complete the report, I was told that it's often three or four hours, but that one has to wait, or the report doesn't get entered into the system. So for the first nearly 18 hours that my car was missing there was no report on it anywhere, because they deleted the information I had given them over the phone when I wasn't there to give the officer the rest of what they needed. (And thanks, too, Hilton security team, for the great advice on this point. I assumed you had dealt with this situation before and could be trusted to know what needed to be done.) I had to go down to the nearest precinct station, wait in line, and give all the information--again--to a woman through a plexiglas window.

I just assumed the car was gone and never coming back, rented one for a week, then bought a used car. The dealer issued a temporary (30 days) permit for driving it.

About a week into that time, I got stopped by the police not because I was doing anything wrong, but just because I had a temporary permit instead of real plates. The officer explained that it's common for car thieves to make phony temp certificates for stolen cars to avoid the registration process. (The things do look like they would be incredibly easy to produce on any cheap color-capable photocopier or computer scanner/printer. Not a very secure system, if you ask me.) He verified that the car was really mine, and I went on my way.

Yesterday I got a call telling me that my car had been recovered two days earlier. They could tell me the street and block where it was found, but not anything else about it. They said no arrest had been made, and it hadn't been in an accident, but that was all I could get from them. I have no idea what circumstances led to its discovery. They couldn't even tell me if it was driveable.

So I had to go to the lot of the towing company and pay $241 to get it out.

Why didn't they call me as soon as it was identified, so that I could claim it immediately without the tow and storage fees? I don't know. Why did they wait two more days to notify me? I don't know.

Did they set up some sort of surveillance in the hopes of catching the felon who had stolen it? Nope. Did they take fingerprints to see who had put the last 200 miles on it? Nope. Did they even bother to contact me to ask whether there was damage to the car that hadn't been there before, or to ask whether maybe the thief left something inside that might identify him, etc.? No, they did not. Basically, they seem to care not one whit about actually finding, arresting, and prosecuting whoever stole my car--at least as judged from their actions.

Now I have to get it repaired, because in the process of wrecking the ignition interlock system, the thief screwed up the whole electrical system, so the thing won't start without a jump. (No, it's not just the battery.) I have no idea how much that will cost.

I wasn't going to write anything about this, but tonight I got the icing on the cake. On my way home from the Hilton, I got stopped again. The officer says I rolled through a stop sign. I won't deny that that's possible, but by long habit even my not-quite-complete stops are awfully darn close--not the classic slow-down-and-go that one commonly sees. The intersection in question is barely even a real intersection; the "cross-street," which comes from only one side, is the private drive to a gated community, and has a lift gate for which exiting cars have to wait. In other words, of all the intersections in the city controlled by stop signs, this one may be the very least likely to have a collision result from failing to come to a complete stop.

I really hate the "don't you have anything better to do" speech that many motorists give police officers when being ticketed for minor traffic offenses. I recognize that enforcing traffic laws protects both lives and property. Still, I couldn't help but think about the insanity of the situation. I get stopped by police officers twice in a month--once for no violation at all, and once for possibly the most inconsequential, hypertechnical violation he could muster--but they couldn't ever stop the actual criminal who was driving my stolen car around for a month??? What, was he the world's most perfect, careful driver? That seems unlikely.

So the Metro police twice stop the law-abiding victim, never the car thief, and make, apparently, zero effort to actually solve the felony that was committed, reasoning, I guess, that if the car gets back to the owner all is well.

No, all is not well. This whole thing was handled with a complete lack of professionalism on the part of the police, both in terms of communicating with the crime victim and in terms of solving the crime. Harassing me twice in approximately the same month that my car was being joy-ridden by somebody else makes the whole experience so damn ironic and galling that I finally had to gripe about it.

Las Vegas Metro police, you suck. Now I know a large part of the reason that Las Vegas is the capital of car theft in the United States: it's because you guys barely lift a finger to stop it, and spend your time and energy harassing the victims instead of the criminals.