Under the radar

You might not think of shopping cart theft as a big problem, but HPD sure does...

(from Dane Schiller of the Chron)

Poor men's pickups or desperate criminals' getaway cars?

Once they escape parking lots, shopping carts become a unique and sometimes problematic part of the urban landscape.

Some carts are abandoned near their home stores.

Others end up miles away parked outside abandoned houses, flipped in ditches or jumbled near bus stops or scrap-metal recycling companies.

"There are more shopping carts than bushes out there," said Lt. Richard Zajac of the Houston Police Department's South Central Patrol Division, which this year launched a special detail to curb cart theft in hopes of stopping more serious crime.

Plainclothes officers hit the streets to see who's pushing carts. In their first 30 shifts, a milestone hit last week, officers rounded up more than 1,000 shopping carts.

Companies don't mind customers temporarily using carts, which cost about $100 apiece. Fiesta even has a crew to retrieve them.

H-E-B and Walgreens outfitted carts with wheel locks triggered by radio waves when a cart wanders too far off. H-E-B still spends almost $300,000 a year on carts for its 67 stores in the region, said Zach Yeglin, H-E-B's customer service director for the Houston division.

"The trend has really picked up in the last six to eight months," he said of cart-napping. "People are just taking the carts home and they are not reappearing. Why they're not, I don't know."

While hunting carts, police find surprises.

In March they caught a slaying suspect hiding as a homeless person. Then there was the time in broad daylight when a drug peddler asked officers sitting in an old pickup if they wanted crack cocaine.

So, if you add up the benefits of cost control for the owners, crime prevention and neighborhood beautification you end up with a nice, tidy program that actually does something to combat crime.

All of that without an acronym. Good job HPD.