Post 6: Finding Accountability
As a follow up from my last post, I wanted to talk more about one of the challenging decisions I faced after being the victim of a burglary: deciding whether or not to press charges on whoever stole my stuff. When I realized what had happened, my first instinct was to dial 911 and report the crime. After all, this had occurred within the span of only a couple hours, in the middle of the day, while we were sitting at home about 50 feet away from the garage that was broken into. Myself or one of my housemates could have easily gone back to the garage while the culprit was there, a situation that very well could have put us in danger. This crime definitely was not random, as the culprit took the time to go through my boxes and bags, taking the valuable items and leaving all of the less valuable items behind. They even took the time to remove my passport and leave it behind, something that made the case even more strange to me.
When two LAPD officers showed up about thirty minutes after my call to take an investigation report, they shared my thoughts about this being a relatively planned, not random event. As we went through and listed the stolen items and their value, it was clear that this wasn’t some random person with financial struggles who just grabbed what they could carry and left, which is fairly common for crimes in the USC area. There was a Ring camera installed directly above the garage that was broken into, but unfortunately, it did not belong to any current residents of the house or to the rental company. The situation made it seem like there was a possibility that someone we knew, either a resident, friend, or someone from the rental company could be the culprit, since the crime happened in broad daylight and there was no sign of forced entry into the main property gate or the garage itself.
The day of the crime, the officers didn’t mention the next steps or process that would follow- they just said that a detective would contact me at some point in the future. They never mentioned that I would need to decide about pressing charges, and I honestly just assumed that filing the report meant that the case had been started. It wasn’t until about a week later, when I finally got a hold of the USC DPS Detective assigned to the case, that anyone actually explained the process to me. This detective strongly urged me against filing charges, saying that I was unlikely to have much success and that it would involve a tedious process for me. However, after all of my other conversations, including with the fingerprint technician who came to the scene, I have suspicions that it was not me that the detective had in mind when she said that pressing charges was a bad idea, but USC’s crime stats. Even after multiple phone conversations with DPS, sending them a copy of the police report, and conversations between the LAPD detective and DPS, this burglary was never reported on the USC crime log and a notification was never sent out to the rest of the students. This was crazy to me, considering that the crime happened just blocks from campus on a street entirely composed of USC students — weren’t they concerned about this happening to someone else?
I knew I would likely never get my stuff back, but I didn’t want the culprit to go to jail or face severe consequences. I wanted there to be some sort of accountability that prevented them from doing this to someone else, and since USC wouldn’t even warn others about what had happened, it seemed like my only option was to move forward with the LAPD investigation by pressing charges.
As someone who has spent a lot of time considering the role of police in society, especially this past year, it was difficult to decide to move forward with the investigation. I believe strongly that there needs to be radical reform and reallocation of funds given to the police force, and I still feel that way after my experience. However, in cases like this one where I know that it was a nonviolent felony that won’t come with jail time, I feel that taking the traditional route to justice was the best decision. I still don’t really know what the next steps look like, but I think I would have regretted not moving forward with the investigation.
