The police who work our area are very conscientious men and women who are really trying to do their job. When we were robbed, the police reaction was immediate and thorough. They fanned out through the neighborhood, checked all the known fence places, rousted known bad actors, and really tried to recover our stuff and arrest the culprit using good, old-fashioned police work. Unfortunately, they are hindered in their jobs by a number of factors.

One of the biggest problems for police is the widespread mistrust of all law enforcement personnel. And it's not an unearned mistrust. There is a long and rich history of police corruption. The city is trying hard to change that, and is making a lot of progress, but until the police are paid a middle class wage, I think the problem will continue. It's really hard to support a family on about $15US a day. I don't condone it, but I can understand why the officers will supplement their salaries with bribes.

The police don't have a lot of resources to help them do their job either. There is no CSU van that shows up at crime scenes and dusts for fingerprints and gathers evidence. There is no police lab that analyzes footprints and DNA. In fact, there is no city budget for bullets. The officers have to pay for those out of their own pockets. So there are a lot of officers out there who are wearing a gun, but have no ammunition.

In spite of all the challenges, our officers work hard every day. They all know who Pepe is. They have a number of nicknames for him, but the only printable one is Pepe Le Pew (when they say it, it comes out more like Pepe Leapt You, so it took me a minute to clue in to what they meant). They have wanted to arrest him for a very long time, but Pepe seems to be charmed.

Late Sunday night, we saw Pepe coming home with an extraordinary amount of copper pipe over his shoulder. He was having a hard time managing it all, and one or two pipes kept trying to get away. The scene would have been comical had I thought he was going to do some late night home improvement, but I knew he had stolen it from the roofs of nearby houses and was going to sell it for drug money. We called the police.

Okay, we didn't actually call the police. I have mentioned before that when we are stressed or excited, our Spanish pretty much goes out the window. In fact it wasn't until much later that Chuck finally came up with tubos, the Spanish word for pipe. I called my friend Juan, who is very familiar with the Pepe saga and wasn't at all upset that we called him at 12:30 in the morning and woke him and his whole family. He called the police for me.

While I was on the phone with Juan, Chuck went up to the roof to keep an eye on Pepe. After he spoke with the police, Juan told me that they would not come because Pepe was already back at his house. The police cannot enter your home without a warrant at all here, and getting a warrant is really difficult. I was crushed, but I thanked Juan.

Chuck came part way down the stairs and asked me if Juan called the police. I started to explain why the police weren't coming. Chuck cut me off, "Call them back! Pepe just broke into Liane's house through her air conditioner hole! He's in there robbing her RIGHT NOW!"

I thought hot diggity dog! If this couldn't get him arrested and out of our lives, nothing could.

I called Juan back and told him what was going on and asked him to call the Police again. I passed the phone to Chuck so he could relay what was going on and tell where Liane's house is and the phone died. We were out of minutes. Crap. I grabbed the other cell phone and called back. As soon as Juan picked up, that one died too. Out of minutes. After screaming at the heavens for a few seconds, I picked up our Vonage phone and made a long distance call from the US to Mexico to call my friend who was less than a mile from me. Isn't technology weird?

The police showed up a few minutes later, very intent and ready to catch a criminal. But with all the phone disconnects and translation between people, they showed up on our street instead of Liane's street. There were bicycle and foot officers searching our street with flashlights, looking in all the dark corners, trying to figure out where the break in was. We have been strongly warned against direct involvement, and we had already kinda crossed the line by calling the police in the first place. If Chuck went down there it would be evident who called the police, and he would be seen helping them. If he didn't go down there, we had no one to blame but ourselves for anything else Pepe did. Chuck went down.

Chuck explained to the officers what was going on and pointed out Liane's house and the hole where Pepe had gone in, and several officers went to the house to investigate. But Chuck failed to actually say Pepe's name or something was lost in the translation, because the officers escorted Chuck up the hill and brought him to a police truck with several young men in the back. None of them were Pepe, although some of his cohorts were present.

Here is another way in which police procedure differs from the US: the officers did not shine a bright light in the suspects' faces, or remove them to a location with one-way glass. They walked Chuck right up to the truck, in the open, and asked him if any of the young men were the one he had seen entering Liane's house. If our cover wasn't blown before, it was certainly decimated now. Chuck kept trying to quietly get one of the officers away from the truck so he could tell him that he knew exactly who broke in to Liane's house.

Finally, with everything clear, the officers around Liane's house began to call Pepe out by name. He didn't come out. The officers went into the house using the same air conditioner hole that Pepe did. The searched the house. No Pepe. He had gotten away.

The police recovered a few of Liane's belongings that had been dropped outside her house. They replaced her air conditioner, which was sitting on a ledge nearby, as best they could. They helped Chuck carry the recovered items back to our house and told him to call in the unlikely event the items turned out not to belong to Liane.

It was now 2:30 in the morning. We sat around pondering what to do next. Pepe and his friends were out there, and they knew we had assisted the police in an attempt to get Pepe arrested. We certainly weren't going to bed.

Liane is out of the country, so I sent her an email letting her know what had happened. Boy is that a hard email to write! How do you email someone to let them know that their house has been broken into? But I didn't have a phone number for her, and she really needed to know so she could make arrangements to have her home secured.

Then we sat down to catch up on some old episodes of Supernatural that we hadn't gotten around to watching, and Chuck made regular patrols to check on our house and Liane's.

Incredibly, around 4:40, Pepe came back to Liane's. He dropped the AC as he was taking it out of its hole down onto the roof of a neighboring house, creating a lot of noise and waking a lot of people up. He was off like a rabbit and did not return that night.

The whole story:
Robbery Redux [4]
The Saga Continues... [5]
So Close
And Yet So Far [6]
Ding Dong, the Meth Head's Gone [7]