Once again, Chuck Ross put on a Crime Watch meeting/breakfast this AM. His guests were Ray Atesiano, our interim Chief, Nick Wollschlager, and Charlie Dayoub. And Charlie's guest was Melody, the dog. Not the "Take a Bite Out of Crime" dog, but a real dog that Charlie is training to sniff out real drugs.
It turns out this is not the first time Charlie has trained a crime dog. He learned the trade somewhere else. And it's sort of a funny story how and why we got the dog. As you know, we rely on the kindness of other municipalities, as Blanche Dubois might have said, when it comes to equipment, like police cruisers. Ray now, and Mitch Glansberg before him, are tight with some of the better off municipalities, and we get some pretty nice hand-me-downs. One of them was a cruiser already outfitted for a dog, or, as they say in police parlance, a canine. So we had Charlie, we got the car, and all we needed was a canine. Charlie says the usual cost for such a beast and the training it requires is about $8-9K. Apparently, we got the whole show for $3000. So now, Charlie is training the dog, I mean canine, to sniff out marijuana, heroin, cocaine, Ecstacy, and methamphetamine.
We got to meet Ray "up close and personal[ly]," too, this morning. He's a very interesting guy. He trained as a corrections officer, then got into police work, then got himself an impressive gig in LA as a detective for three and a half years, then got "homesick" and came back here, to Hialeah, for 10 years, then reshaped crime prevention/intervention and detective work in Sunny Isles Beach, then started his own detective business, and did that until the economy crashed. For as long as it lasts (he sounds quite ambitious), we have his remarkable services. And it became clear how advantageous to us those services have been already.
Ray's favorite word is proactive. Charlie says you can't train just any dog to be a productive police canine. The dog has to be energetic and goal-directed. That's Ray. He knows the business, of criminals and apprehending them, very well, and he takes the long view. He told us several times that an arrest is a very valuable thing, not so much because of the immediate result it produces, but even more because it inhibits further crime. A person who is arrested somewhere is not coming back to that location. So he told us it may sound like bad news, but it's really good news, that our department had 653 arrests this year, not counting the 23 from last night along the FEC track. The second highest number in BP history is less than 200 in a year. It's not that those arrested were committing major crimes here at the time of the arrest. It's that it's too much trouble, and too dangerous, to commit even minor mischief here, and these mischief-makers won't come back. And when our department makes an arrest, for anything, they are very effective. "Clearance rates," the percent of arrests that result in solid charges, is now flirting with 80% for BP. Typical rates for other municipalities often crack 10%, but not often 30%.
And the enterprise rests, as we've been told so many times before, on us. It's our awareness and attentiveness to the neighborhood, and, Ray and Chuck say ad nauseum, our readiness to call in if we see anything that doesn't look right. Or anything that doesn't look familiar, or expected. Ray insists that we call. "Tips" like this are what the police thrive on. The worst possible result of calling is that the police go investigate, and they find out nothing is wrong. This does not count as a bad result.
We had 15-20 BP residents at this morning's event. Nobody was disappointed. Turnout like this is better than nothing, but it's not good. Chuck says over 400 people are "members" of CrimeWatch, and he'd like to make it 600 or more. It would have been great to have loaded the room with interested neighbors. Please come next time, if you didn't come this time, and tell your neighbors to come. In fact, pass this blog post along. And make sure Chuck knows about you. Contact him at CrimeWatch, and get on the list. You'll get e-mails of anything to do with CrimeWatch and related Village events. Not that it matters, but it's free.
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