TOD, Part II
House and Apartment Break-Ins
1. My friend and I, shortly after moving to L.A. in June 1972, came home one night (this was at Franklin and Whitley) to find the turntable and amp and speakers gone from the living room. I don't remember if that was all, but there had been some cash on the kitchen table and they'd completely missed that. We were as naive as could be back then, because here we were, now living in the big bad city and having taken no precautions such as locking the slider door to the balcony which is how the police showed us they'd entered. This unit was on the first floor, right in front, and climbing up onto those balconies was a pretty simple matter back then before people were installing barriers.
1a. Still naive (and that's putting it nicely) several months later, I parked my Schwinn bicycle in the alcove at the entrance to Pickwick Books, completely unlocked, and found it -- SURPRISE!

-- gone when I came out. DUH.
2. In 1988, just a few months before I'd be moving from West Hollywood (Kings Road) to the east coast, I came home from work one evening to find that one single thing from my audio/video rack had been unplugged and taken away -- the Beta HiFi VCR. They left everything else around it, which is absolutely inexplicable. This was on a weekday and I remember it was still daylight when I got home and discovered it. That evening I had a locksmith install a "long" deadbolt on the front door and a locking mechanism on the slider going out to the balcony. Yes, another slider and another balcony.
3. In 1999, having lived in this house for several years, Kristi and I came home to find the jewelry boxes in our bedrooms (containing sentimental stuff, nothing expensive) ransacked and emptied or missing entirely. The rest of the house seemed to be untouched, including -- again -- all of my audio and video stuff. The police came out and said that by all rights, the room with that stuff should have been emptied, and that I was very lucky. They also said it all looked like the work of kids -- very likely someone we knew, and that they were looking for easy stuff to carry and pawn. Locks changed, and nothing was ever found.
I think -- and hope -- that's the end of my little story.