\u201cThe police are worthless. I don’t know what we’re paying them for.\u201d<\/p>\n
That familiar, despairing lament was voiced by a friend here in Payette after his family had lost $20,000 worth of property a burglary. The crime was solved before the police intervened: Some of the pilfered property was still in possession of the suspects, who admitted that it didn’t belong to them. Working on their own initiative, my friend and his adult daughter — the primary victim — tracked down more of the stolen goods at local yard sales and garage sales.<\/p>\n
A phone call to the Payette PD led to a visit by an officer who was courteous, professional, and who provided no practical help of any kind. He did arrest one suspect, a mentally deficient man who readily admitted to the officer that he had taken the property because an unspecified \u201cthey\u201d had told him it was \u201call right\u201d to do so.<\/p>\n
Neither the responding officer, nor the colleague who took over the case when the first officer went on vacation, expended any effort to identify who \u201cthey\u201d were, or to press charges against the accomplices. The case was closed with the arrest of a solitary man \u2014 a registered sex offender — who \u201cbecame somewhat upset [because] he was the only one who was going to be in trouble for the thefts that occurred, because he was honest,\u201d as an investigative report summarized.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe police wouldn’t bother to fingerprint my stolen property,\u201d Elizabeth Puckett, the owner of the property, recounted to me. \u201cWhen I asked why, the officer said, `Well, we’re not CSI.’\u201d It shouldn’t be assumed that the Payette PD is consistently insouciant about the collection of forensic evidence. A few years ago, Puckett recalls, she received a visit from the\u00a0<\/span>Animal Control<\/a>\u00a0officer (<\/span>an official with whom I’ve had some experience<\/a>) after the department received a report that \u201cwe had a dog that looked like a pit bull.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n