To solve a crime, press the “Home” key

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from television, it’s that no good news ever follows the words, “Hello, sir?  I’m Detective Smith from Such-and-Such County Sheriff’s Department. Do you have a moment?”

It turns out that this isn’t true, though: In fact, this morning’s unsolicited call from a far-away detective actually made both of us happy: Thanks to a couple of fairly recent — and better yet, nonintrusive — innovations in consumer electronics, I’ve unwittingly given the agency evidence it needs to investigate suspected members of a stolen-goods ring — and I managed to recover some personal property in the process.

As the detective himself said this morning, “I love it when things come together.”

The backstory: About a month ago, my wife and I were returning from a visit to my parent’s house  when we suddenly noticed that our dash-mounted GPS receiver was missing from its mount. We came up with several theories for its absence, but eventually we accepted the queasy truth: Someone — possibly someone we knew — had broken in and stolen the unit from the car while it was parked near the house on my parents’ driveway, far from the quiet rural road on which they live.

We never reported the unit stolen, partly because we didn’t plan to claim it against our insurance, and partly because we didn’t want to find out that someone we knew might have taken it (there were a lot of friends and family visiting my parents that weekend). Besides, police have bigger problems, right? (Ok, so maybe we’re just apathetic).

Apparently, not reporting theft is common, though, and because of this, cops seldom have any way to prove items are stolen when they find them. The victims lose their valuables, and the police lose their chance at an arrest.

“Every bit of information helps,” the detective said. “It may not lead to anything, but sometimes it makes all the difference in the world.”

Thanks to old-fashioned detective work combined with some modern conveniences, though, this wasn’t the case this morning, when the  detective called to ask whether I might be missing a GPS unit.

It turns out that several suspicious electronic items were found recently during a routine arrest at the coast,  and while the police suspected that the equipment was stolen, they had no way of proving it… until one detective noticed the GPS unit, found its power cord and booted it up to press the “Go home” button: Instantly, he had a likely owner’s address — and a short while later, he had me on the phone, asking whether I might be missing something.

I’m sure he was satisfied he’d found the owner, but still, an on-screen address and a guy who volunteers that he lost a GPS when asked hardly add up to strong evidence to help him build a case. Especially when the guy is somebody like me — notoriously bad at keeping track of receipts, registrations, etc. (In fact, when the cop asked what kind of vehicle we had been driving, I couldn’t even remember whether we were in my wife’s car or mine).

But this is where the Web kicks in:  I have never filled out a paper registration card when I buy new items (who has the time?), but the Web has made things almost too easy: Within minutes of opening the box for the GPS last summer, I registered it at garmin.com to download new maps, etc. So this morning,  when the detective asked for the model and serial number — tada, I had it available almost immediately. Numbers matched, and a case was made for theft.

(And in case you’re wondering: common GPS units don’t actually “send”  coordinates for others to track; that would have been both too easy to find, and, well, creepy. The receivers simply receive data from the satellites and figure out where they are from there. It was the bookmarked “Home” location that provided the detectives with their first clue as to the rightful owner.)

Not sure who was happier that everything fit together: the detective claimed it was probably him (he has his evidence, after all), but he doesn’t know my love for seeing new technologies solve old problems — especially when there’s so little effort on my part.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 1:56 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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