Thursday, April 02, 2009

Masterminds

It's no secret that we love stories that involve criminals. After all, once the story has hit the news, it's probably because there's been a fairly key (and simply avoided) mistake made, and, well, that's just the price that some people have to pay for trying to lead a life of crime. Of course, we're fairly certain that the people involved in these stories can't really say that the did more than lead at most a few weeks of crime, since they have a need to get themselves caught.

Take, for example, a woman attempting to steal over a thousand dollars worth of groceries and other merchandise from a St. Louis store. If only she'd checked to see which automatic doors she was going towards.

That's part of the danger that's inherent in approaching a crime in any store with specifically marked "Entrance" and "Exit" doors. Sure, you could try and plan ahead of time, to make sure that you're using the correct door when you need to make your escape, but we assume that there's probably a moment, in the thick of the crime, where you're so caught up in the activity that any previous planning would go for naught. Of course, we're also fairly certain that plenty of people would have been able to recover quickly enough to try the other doors, but, not knowing the layout, we can't go making too many assumptions. And it's not like the woman just chose the location for her offense incredibly poorly.

Unlike the Utah teenager who decided that he just had to spray paint something, and chose a police car. To make things even better, the police cars were parked at the police station. Apparently the kid involved just didn't put together the likelihood that maybe a cop would generally be fairly close to his squad car. While it's true that he showed some wisdom by not choosing a doughnut shop, he couldn't have picked a much worse second option.

Maybe these two should get together. In the future, he can just tag exit doors, and she can follow along like a bloodhound. It would be a match made in the courtroom of Judge Judy.

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