Elmer Smith: Few Mensa members in city's perp parade
YOU COULDN'T run a flashlight on the energy emitted by the brain of your average criminal. That's why you'll never see a show called "CSI Philadelphia." Police don't pursue criminals here. They just kind of stumble across them.
YOU COULDN'T run a flashlight on the energy emitted by the brain of your average criminal.
That's why you'll never see a show called "CSI Philadelphia." Police don't pursue criminals here. They just kind of stumble across them.
Police sometimes find them within a stone's throw of the crime scene, dressed as they were when they committed the crime. As often as not, they violate fundamental fugitive protocol by staying close to their partners in crime. Even in old cowboy movies, bad guys split up to confuse a pursuing posse.
Not here. Our local crooks are either caught at the scene of their next crime or, if police bother to look, they find them hiding in plain sight at their grandmother's or their girlfriend's house.
Some crimes are so brazen or bizarre that their very nature attests to the astonishing arrogance or diminished capacity of their perpetrators. But every once in awhile, we hear about a crime of such staggering stupidity that it makes you want to peel back the perpetrator's scalp for a closer look at the inner workings of his brain.
What was the K-9 officer thinking when he allegely helped himself to a stack of money from a safe at Pat's Cafe? How could he think he'd get away with it when two other officers who had also answered the call apparently were on the premises?
It's even more perplexing when you consider that the unnamed cop had to know there was a surveillance camera operating in the bar. Surveillance video from that bar was entered into evidence in the trial of Solomon Montgomery, the man convicted of the murder four years ago of
Officer Gary Skerski during a robbery at Pat's.
"There is a portion of [this week's] tape that shows one of the officers taking something from the safe," Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey told a news conference yesterday.
All three had been assigned to desk duty pending an Internal Affairs investigation. But Ramsey said the other two were guilty of nothing more than taking a soft drink without paying for it. They will be returned to street duty, he said.
"The other two did not see the third officer," Ramsey said. He said they have not recovered the $825 that was reported missing.
What would make a veteran cop risk his career to lift $825 from an open safe during a burglary investigatiion?
Part of his punishment should be to star in a reality show about stupid criminals.
Then there's the case of the three Drexel students who, inexplicably, have risked all that they have worked so hard to achieve in life in an incredibly inept alleged robbery of a fellow Drexel student in her apartment at 36th and Lancaster.
Jamie Harris, the starting point guard for Drexel's basketball team; Kevin Phillip, a teammate, and Devin Bond, who played freshman ball at Drexel, all are charged with burglary, robbery, conspiracy, weapons offenses and assault. They face prison time if convicted of those felony charges.
Police say Bond was invited into the apartment. But before he went into the apartment, they say, a surveillance video shows him sticking a piece of paper between the door and the lock to keep it ajar for his accomplices.
They say that Harris and Phillip came through the unlocked front door waving guns. They left after finding no money in the apartment, police said.
Harris and Phillip were on scholarship. All three of them were upperclassmen, just a year or two from cashing in on a first-class education.
"Nobody can figure it out," Lt. John Walker told me yesterday. "That's what we're hearing from all over the country."
The K-9 cop, whose name has not been released, and the three Drexel students passed rigorous tests to get them into the positions they once enjoyed. So these are case studies in acquired stupidity.
I'd pay cash money to see how their brains work.
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