Do it yourself in Wild West fashion
An interesting story about how the Finnish police failed to take an interest in a crime, the individual took matters into their own hands and got results. A laptop was stolen from an automobile which was then sold on huuto.net (Finnish ebay), the owner won the huuto.net auction and confronted the thief…
The Apple PowerBook computer that had been on floor between the front and back seat was no longer there. Päivärinta marched to the police station and reported the theft. The result was fairly predictable: “I was told that finding the laptop again was pretty unlikely. The police officer basically just shrugged”, recalls Päivärinta of the meeting three weeks ago. After the police comments, he was more or less resigned to the fact that the laptop was a goner and he would never see it or its equally valuable contents again.
[...]The seller wrote that he had acquired the “nearly-new” laptop as a legacy. All of the details of the machine fitted with the one liberated from Päivärinta’s car, including all the comments made by the seller to enquiries from potential buyers. Päivärinta called the police about the suspicious online sale. “I got a reply from the police that could I get back to them a bit later. It was frustrating, because I needed the machine and its contents back, and there it was, kind of on a plate.”
Päivärinta acknowledges that a great deal of police time and energy goes into crimes that are more serious than the property theft of a laptop computer. By the same token, he did feel nevertheless that the police were rather indifferent about pursuing the case. “It occasionally felt as though the only way to get anything done was to do it yourself in Wild West fashion”, he commented.
