New York Wants Our Blood So Time To Get Outta Here.

The second to last week in NY Meredith came to visit us. It was so fun to have her there and share some of our experiences in the city with her.

One night we decided to eat at a cafe that was open to the sidewalk and streets. At one point Andrew's bag was set down under the table and after some miscommunication about who was watching it, the bag was left there alone for 2 minutes while I paid for the food 3 feet away. In that moment someone came by and swept up Andrew's nice leather bag which contained his Macbook Air and some sketchbooks. We didn't realize it had been taken until an hour later after we left to go to another store and came back.

Last time we were robbed, the police told us to install the Find my iPhone app so that we can locate our stolen mac products. We did that after talking to the robbery detectives the other month. We thought our chances of recovering it were golden since the police said they use it all the time to relocate things. We hurriedly locked the computer remotely only to read more carefully later that by doing that we ruined our chances of geo-locating it (thanks for the huge self destruct button warning, Apple!). After the Police were really pessimistic and told Andrew that they probably wouldn't find it, Andrew made a satirical illustration of a police officer. Notice his lovely water gun.

The next morning after trying to come to terms with losing a big piece of Andrew's life, the app located Andrew's computer here in Brooklyn:

The computer was connected to the internet during the night and geolocated itself before locking. After I got the exact location, I tried going all vigilante and checked out the building. It was in a ghetto neighborhood and the building location had 4 floors. After my calculation it could have been in either 3 or 6 different apartments (not bad, right?). The Macbook was possibly right behind these walls, and I couldn't do anything about it.

The police looked at video surveillance and got a shot of the guys face. They said it is really hard to get search warrants and they were going to circulate the guys picture around the precinct. It's a technique they use that's really effective for catching people 20 years down the road. Don't go to this precinct in NY (okay maybe just any precinct in NY) if you want to get help. They have bigger cases to deal with.

So after giving them a pretty specific location, a photo of the guy and a serial number of the laptop, going to the apartment building and talking to the landlord with a picture of the guy who probably lives there and even more specifically, in a certain area of the building, was probably going to take too much effort. We no longer have any confidence in the detective abilities of the NYPD. I bet that if the computer had been stolen in Provo then we would have gotten it back.

I should have gone up to one of the officers and asked for some of my tax money back. We realized that t.v. detective shows are so not real. They don't have the smarts or power to do half of the stuff you see on t.v. After having 3 separate instances of theft, we were really ready to get out of New York and go back to Provo, Utah where a parking ticket is the most action the police department gets on a good day.