Most Burglaries in Redlands/Loma Linda Go Unsolved

For the Redlands Unified School District, keeping eager thieves from taking the electronics taken from classrooms and district offices is challenging.

Several schools, and even the district offices, were broken into more than a dozen times at the end of 2011 and the start of this year, school officials said.

“The District has stepped up efforts around the District to combat theft and other vandalism,” Cameron Brown, Coordinator, Facilities Planning Services, with Redlands Unified School District, said in an e-mail referring to the thefts.

More challenging than keeping thieves out, however, has been recovering the missing equipment.

According to state Department of Justice statistics, Redlands Police investigators solved about one-third of all burglary cases it handled over the five-year period of 2005-09. The statistics are the most recent complete data provided by the state.

Meanwhile, just under 11 percent of all auto thefts were solved during that time, while larceny/thefts were cleared at nearly 17 percent.

Loma Linda cases -- which are handled by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department’s Central Station -- faced longer odds of being solved. Over the same five-year period, only 9.92 percent of the 678 reported burglaries were cleared, nearly 4 percent of 694 auto thefts and about 5 percent of larcenies and thefts were solved.

Neither city saw significant spikes up or down in most of the reported crimes, though Redlands did have only 295 reported auto thefts in 2009, the lowest number in the five-year period, down from a five-year high of 447 in 2005.

Redlands did see a rise in its clearance rates in 2009 – except in the auto theft category – with 34 percent of burglaries solved, while 20.7 percent of larcenies were cleared.

“Some of the challenges with burglaries have to do with witnesses,” said Redlands Police Lt. Shawn Ryan. “Usually with burglaries it’s challenging to find witnesses to the crime.”

Witnesses are key to many investigations. Most burglars commit their crimes away from prying eyes and try to leave little evidence for investigators, Ryan said.

Burglaries are not taken lightly and deputies will collect any evidence they find, said San Bernardino County Sheriff's Deputy Lolita Harper.

“If they leave fingerprints, we’ll pull them. If they leave DNA, we’ll pull it. If there’s a pattern or something we’re seeing in an area we’ll map that,” Harper said.

But if the burglar breaks a window with a rock and takes a stereo leaving little behind, it becomes like a literal search for a needle in a haystack, officials said.

Burglars are more informed on the methods police use to crack down on burglaries and are mindful of what they leave behind, Ryan said. Redlands Police will send their forensics teams to as many burglary scenes as they can, though sometimes it may take a day, he said.

There are things people can do to increase the odds of reclaiming their property, Harper said, including recording product serial numbers and remembering the exact make and model of valuable items.

“It’s helpful because most stolen things end up at pawn shops and pawn shops do have to report to us,” Harper said. “But when we don’t have the info to cross reference then we can’t identify the property.”

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