NEW ORLEANS — When Michael Harrington’s truck and some of his neighbors’ cars on Jay Street were broken into Jan. 16 in the Lakeshore area of New Orleans, he called 911.
"We don't keep anything in our vehicles but they're happy to break in just to find out," Harrington said. “From what we could tell, just walking around the neighborhood, it was just the three of us on this little street.”
Through security surveillance, his Lake Vista neighborhood was able to identify a dark colored Audi SUV with license plate number 700ACX being used to allegedly commit the crimes. With concern that SUV may be stolen, Harrington gave the video and pictures to officers from both the Orleans Levee District and NOPD.
"We were told on follow up that the vehicle was not stolen, it was not reported stolen at the time of the incident,” Harrington said.
Turns out, that SUV was stolen. It belongs to Roxanne McCracken who lives on the Northshore. It was stolen a couple of days before, on Jan. 13 from Calhoun Street near Audubon Park, about eight miles away from where Harrington lives. It was found abandoned, two weeks later, Jan. 27, about 20 miles away on Alsace Street in New Orleans East.
In an email, NOPD tells WWL the SUV's vehicle identification and license plate numbers were entered into the National Crime Information Center Jan. 15, the day before Harrington reported those break-ins and 12 days before it was found with its wheels missing. In that email, NOPD says for an unknown reason, the license plate never got flagged as stolen, only the VIN. That was a major concern for McCracken.
"It's not me committing crimes, it's my car and if it's not on the registry then police are not out there looking for it, how do they stop it," McCracken said.
Harrington says once he realized that SUV was stolen, it was most likely the same one recently reported in other New Orleans' neighborhoods, also reported to police.
"It's completely discouraging because we can try to make all of these investments we need to keep our neighborhoods and our property safe, but if these folks are not going to talk together, if they're just going to be completely bogged down in their own incompetence, nothing’s going to change," Harrington said.
It's still unclear whether there is a direct connection between this problem and that December cyber-attack against the city which has crippled some departments, reaching of course to the police department as well.
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