A rash of vehicle break-ins in the city of Shawano has Police Chief Mike Musolff calling for parents to keep closer track of their teenage kids.
“There’s a significant amount of increased calls of people — kids, most likely — breaking into cars and breaking windows around town, which we’re investigating,” Musolff said.
He noted that there were three calls on the night of July 16 alone about broken vehicle windows, and there have been spurts where there are multiple calls in a single night.
“Parents need to be on top of this because their kids, they shouldn’t be out at 1, 2, 3 in the morning,” Musolff said. “I don’t know how they’re getting out of the house. If we could get parents to parent a little bit better, maybe that wouldn’t happen. I’m calling them out, whoever their parents are.”
Musolff noted if it’s the same perpetrators, there could be at least a couple dozen charges levied by the time the police catch them, which could result in serious sentences and fines.
“That’s the part that’s bad for those kids, because they don’t realize that they might have got away with it last night, but they might be caught two nights later and they might have already done three more,” Musolff said. “If they don’t get caught for a couple of weeks, they might have 14 things hanging over their head.”
Musolff said he doesn’t believe parents aren’t aware that their children are leaving the house at night.
“They’ve got to figure out a way to get them to stay in the house,” he said. “That’s not unreasonable to ask that the parents parent so the police don’t have to.”
Locking a vehicle’s doors makes it less likely someone will steal stuff out of it, and Musolff also recommends not having valuable items in the vehicle at night.
“Take the extra time, but at the minimum make sure to lock your cars to try and prevent any of those crimes from happening,” Musolff said. “Those crimes are the ones that are quality of life issues in the city of Shawano, when they have their space violated. Nobody wants that to happen. Thefts are the worst.”
There can be multiple vehicle burglary calls in a single night, followed by several nights without complaint, and then another night where there are more calls, according to Musolff.
“It seems like every summer we have this different group of kids who break out of their house or whatever they do, or their parents just don’t care, and they vandalize or do graffiti or whatever they do,” Musolff said. “Then we catch them, and then it stops. It seems like it’s rinse and repeat every year. I don’t know where they get this idea from. Do they sit around in the basement and go, ‘Hey, let’s go damage somebody’s window that is unsuspective of us doing it’? What are you getting out of it?”
lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com
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