Cops say help from public can help bust burglars

• Reprints

The former Trefon’s restaurant off McLean Boulevard and Main Lane is where a wary Elgin police officer caught burglars posing as contractors while they were loading scrap metal into a truck a few weeks ago. | Michael Smart~Sun-Times Media

Article Extras

Updated: March 6, 2012 8:15AM

ELGIN — It was 11 a.m. the Monday before Christmas. The men seemed casual and normal as they carried pipe out of a vacant restaurant in the Town & Country Shopping Center and attached it to the roof of their truck.

But a passing police officer smelled a rat.

He stopped and asked them what they were doing. They said the vacant building’s owner had hired them to carry away some of the equipment inside. The officer found out who did own the building, called up and learned that the men actually were burglars.

*****

Just after sunset a week ago Friday, another officer’s suspicions were raised when he noticed a truck parked outside a home on Lin-Lor Lane that had a for sale sign in front. The patrolman drove back past the place and saw two middle-aged men carry an expensive refrigerator out of the house, then load it onto their truck. He, too, stopped and asked what the men were doing. Soon they also were in jail on a burglary charge.

*****

Last Sunday, a man who lives along Ann Street noticed an odd sound coming from a back bedroom at about 10 p.m. He opened the room’s door and found himself face to face with a teenager who had crawled in through a window and was trying to steal a video game system. The boy ran away. But the homeowner remembered seeing the youth around the neighborhood before, and after he identified the teen’s face in photo lineup, that burglar also ended up in handcuffs.

*****

If the city of Elgin is going to slam the lid on a recent swelling of home burglaries, stories like these need to be repeated by neighbors and cops watching out for suspicious activity, Police Chief Jeff Swoboda says. But encouraging a neighborhood watch mentality is just one of several tactics Swoboda ordered last week to address the break-in problem.

When final Elgin crime statistics for 2011 were announced two weeks ago, city leaders could proudly claim that the number of offenses had gone down in almost every category. Even the previously troublesome areas of strong-armed robbery and vehicle burglaries were down.

But the one glaring exception was burglaries to buildings, which shot up 31 percent over their 2010 level.

Last year, the owners of 564 homes and businesses reported being burglarized — an average of about 1½ per day.

At least part of that increase was due to a boom in break-ins to foreclosed or otherwise-vacant houses, often to steal the homes’ copper piping or appliances.

The chief said the anti-burglary crusade includes appointing one detective in the major investigations division to devote himself exclusively to burglaries. That will “make it more likely that common patterns and cross-case clues will be noticed,” Swoboda said. “But in general, the program is just refocusing our efforts.”

Program details

Swoboda said he asked the heads of each unit in the police department to come up with ideas about what they could do to fight the burglary wave. As a result, the following steps are being taken:

Detectives will focus on convicted burglars who have been released from prison.

“Burglary is a crime that you don’t typically do just once,” he said. “And when you go into a house and cut the copper pipes out of a wall, there’s some knowledge and tools involved in doing that.”

The department’s drug unit, which works largely through informants and tipsters, will ask the same people who point the finger at drug dealers what they know about people committing burglaries.

“There’s often a connection between using drugs and committing burglaries, and the same people who know about one may have some ideas about who’s doing the other,” Swoboda said.

At the other end of the social spectrum, detectives also will be looking more closely at legitimate building contractors who may be benefiting from some of the crimes.

For example, in Highland Woods subdivision and other far-west areas, a number of brand-new air-conditioning units have been stolen from outside vacant homes.

“We don’t think these are just being taken for their scrap metal value,” Swoboda said. “They’re probably being sold to somebody who’s glad to buy some cheap equipment that ‘happened to fall off a truck.’ ”

As in the cases above, patrol officers will keep an eye on vacant homes and businesses, and question people seen moving stuff out of them.

All too often, as in the restaurant incident, a thief with a moving truck or construction vehicle who’s brazen enough to work in broad daylight will simply be ignored by the people around him, when he should be challenged, Swoboda said.

In a similar vein, “we are asking people who live next to vacant homes to keep an eye out,” the chief said. “Don’t just assume someone is legitimate. If you see someone working in the empty house next door and something doesn’t seem right, call 911 and have us check them out.””

The department will work with four types of businesses that themselves are legitimate but provide potential markets for the loot from burglaries — resale shops, cash-for-gold stores, pawn shops and recycling centers.

Besides visiting each such center to remind employees about existing laws and rules, city leaders are considering whether city ordinances may need to be revised to force such dealers into better record keeping.

The copper pipe thieves may be bent on selling the pipes as scrap copper, whose value has zoomed in recent years. But state laws already require scrap dealers to collect the identities of anyone selling a significant amount of scrap. Pawn shops, too, are required to get the identities of people bringing in such items as jewelry, appliances and musical instruments.

But the Fox Valley has seen a boom in the number of resale shops and flea markets, as well as stores offering to buy gold and silver jewelry by the ounce. And those kinds of businesses are not as rigidly controlled.

“If someone sells something to a resale shop, they’re supposed to keep a record of it with its serial number,” Swoboda noted. “But we have a new database of merchandise serial numbers called LEADS (Law Enforcement Data System) Online, and at this point, shops like this are not required to upload their serial numbers into that system.”

He said the department will ask resale shops to report the serial numbers voluntarily, or it may ask the city council to pass an ordinance requiring such reporting.

“Nowadays, gold jewelry is very easy to get rid of,” the chief said. “When a burglary occurs, that doesn’t mean a guy is carrying a sack out of a house at 3 a.m. These things happen at any time of day, and the burglar often can carry out everything they stole in their pants pocket.”