Attacking property crimes

Most people know someone whose home has been burglarized. But how many of those people later gained the satisfaction of seeing the burglar caught, prosecuted and incarcerated? The answer is hardly any, especially in Las Vegas and unincorporated Clark County.

Las Vegas police are battling a boom in burglary. Officers who responded to an average of 41 per day in 2006 now handle nearly 49. And according to figures from the FBI and the Nevada Department of Public Safety, only 6.7 percent of those cases will be solved.

"We get burglary reports where we have absolutely nothing," said police Capt. Stavros Anthony, noting that very few consumers document the model and serial numbers of home electronics that are especially popular with thieves. "All we have is that it was broken into, some stuff was taken. If somebody breaks into a house and nobody sees anything, we have absolutely nothing to follow up on. That's basically it."

The first charge of police is protecting public safety. Murderers, rapists and armed robbers are of much greater concern to detectives. But criminals are notorious opportunists, and the department's appropriate focus on street-level thuggery might very well have prompted many lawbreakers to change specialties. In a Tuesday meeting with the Review-Journal's editorial board, Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie said the valley's spike in burglaries could be a result of his department's success in stopping armed robberies.

That's of little consolation to the valley's tens of thousands of property crime victims. Whether you've been robbed at gunpoint or had your home ransacked, the end result is the same: The treasure you worked hard to attain has been seized by someone else.

Certainly, police can do more to improve their woeful burglary case clearance rate, which is about half the national average -- the department's recent gains in deterring car thefts show how a switch in strategy can catch more crooks and scare off countless others.

Sheriff Gillespie said shifting property crime detectives, who had been working from a single office, to the valley's various area commands should benefit burglary investigations by cutting their travel time, allowing them to focus on specific regions and interact with the officers who respond to burglary calls. That's a good start.

Tougher sentences for convicted burglars would be appropriate, given how difficult it is for police to make arrests. Make no mistake, when cops book a thief, the absence of a criminal record does not mean the suspect was unlucky enough to get caught on his first offense. Rather, it means the suspect probably got away with between 10 and 30 burglaries before picking the wrong house or business.

Given property criminals' high rate of recidivism, it's past time for the state to create a database of convicts, not unlike the one that tracks sex offenders. Imagine being able to log onto the Internet and find out whether any car thieves or burglars live in your neighborhood. The brand of "registered property criminal" might be enough to scare some thieves straight.

In the meantime, home and business owners can take steps to protect their property. Sheriff Gillespie urges everyone to call the non-emergeny 311 and ask to speak to a crime prevention specialist. These trained professionals will visit any home, business or apartment complex and offer recommendations that might one day be enough to send a burglar to a different address.