The Price of Privilege
Published October 9, 2007
By Suzanne Lunden
At 10:15 a.m. on September 19, 2007, I was filling up the cow-shaped tea-kettle (that, sadly, does not moo when the water’s boiling) at the kitchen sink of my Buell Street home when something, or rather someone, caught my bleary eye: a kid in a black sweatshirt, hood pulled down over his eyes, was peering around the high hedge that separates my driveway from the giant parking lot / backyard of my neighbors. Strange, but not that strange, considering that I cut through a stranger’s backyard pretty much every day on my way up to campus (however, while doing so, I try to keep any suspicious hedge-peering to a minimum).
Stranger, though, was the progression of this stranger from the hedge to right outside my back door in the few moments between my setting down the kettle and pouring a bowl of Cheerios. I gawked at him, spoon mid-lift, and he at me, as though he was just as startled by my pajama clad-presence in my own kitchen as I was by his black-hoodied appearance on the porch. I guess I expected him to run away or ninja-kick the door open and kill me, or at least do something exciting, but he just stood there, watching me drip milk on the floor in my polka-dot boxers.
In the next few moments I did something that has since been universally agreed upon as Just Plain Stupid — I blame it on lack of proper caffeination — but, for whatever reason, I gave the Guy in the Black Hoodie a quizzical look, put down my Cheerios, unlocked the door, opened it - just a crack! - and said:
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
Confused silence.
“Uh, can I help you?’
“Is Chris here?”
Sound familiar? This brief exchange certainly rang in my ears a few hours later, as I sat in the library- having successfully driven off the stranger with a firm “Nope, sorry” and a shut door to the face- and read an email from the Burlington Police Department. The e-mail was informing students of an increase in burglaries downtown. According to the message, the burglars usually enter through an unlocked door, and, if they encounter a “homeowner,” feign confusion and exit quickly, potentially with your roommate’s iPod in his pocket.
This all rather freaked me out, and my fears were not alleviated when, upon returning home that evening, my roommates informed me that the house next door had been robbed between 6 and 11 a.m. that morning. So basically, while I triumphantly ate my Cheerios and drank my tea, the Guy in the Black Hoodie had simply proceeded onto the next house, found it empty and unlocked, grabbed a laptop or two, and walked away, easy as pie.
So we talked to a cop (whose heel-rocking and warnings not to sleep naked lest strange men crawl in my second story window in the night actually creeped me out far more than the potential burglar’s confused stare), and he gave us the common-sense spiel: lock the door when no one’s around, don’t leave your laptop on a window sill, etc. Well, duh.
As much as we all like to think of Burlington as a friendly, safe, chilled-out little haven of happiness and goodwill, it’s also the closest thing Vermont has to a city, and cities have crime. Maybe we don’t need the chain and triple dead-bolt combination à la Boston or New York, but we do need to realize that we are pretty damn lucky to have sweet apartments and laptops and DVD collections on display in the living room. Good-natured naïveté may have done you well while convincing the Millis RA that that smell was just some rank incense or your 9 a.m. Math 17 professor that your alarm just totally didn’t go off every Friday morning. With the responsibility of living off-campus, however, needs to come not only a respect for your roommates’ and your belongings (yes, I am channeling your mother), but a true realization of your relative privilege.
Maybe the Guy in the Black Hoodie just really wanted an ipod but couldn’t afford it, or maybe he could afford it but had the devious yet clever thought, “Hey, why should I spend money on something which I could probably find for free sitting on a desk in at least twenty unlocked houses in a four block radius? These airheads who puked on my grandmother’s lawn last weekend after screaming the wrong words to that song from The Lion King for twenty minutes obviously don’t want their ipods enough to lock their fucking door.”
Whatever the situation, such deviousness, as all the movies have shown us, can only be thwarted by suave, well-dressed intelligence and uber-advanced computer maneuvering. You can’t do the second if the Guy in the Black Hoodie is playing World of Warcraft on your Mac, so aim for the first: trade in your polka-dot boxers for something slinky, throw on some shades, and lock the door on your way out.
(Editor’s note: See
this BPD press release regarding the recent arrest of a subject involved in these types of burglaries.)
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