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  1. #17
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    Oct 2014
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    Default Re: Accused of Theft After Finding Lost Property

    Quote Quoting cdwjava
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    How about common sense. The officer did not respond into the store, ask to review random video, and then make a call to issue a citation or write a report. Someone reported the matter and as a result, provided some spin or interpretation to the matter that is clearly not evident to us here.

    All we know is that the police made contact with the OP about this. We have no information on what lead to that. More to the point, we have no information that suggests that the cops had anything more than a report of the wallet and phone being stolen and someone (whether personally or by video) observing the OP picking up the phone and then putting it back. While that would certainly be sufficient for reasonable suspicion to investigate to see if the they could connect the OP to the theft, that information alone would not support a prosecution for theft given the ordinance at issue. So far as we know, the cops have nothing connecting the OP to the wallet, and moreover if the OP had stolen the phone and the wallet and wanted to keep both, the OP wouldn't have tossed it away, much less come back after tossing it, look at it, and then put it back again. That’s not a very realistic scenario. So I don’t agree that common sense supports the conclusion that the cops must have had something more to justify the citation. Maybe they did, but we have no information on that and nothing here logically gets you there. They had sufficient information to at least investigate. But whether they got enough to make a solid case for theft is another matter, and we lack information on that. As I said before, just going on the facts the OP did provide, the citation doesn’t appear to be supportable. That’s all we have to work with. Again, we can speculate until the cows come home what more the cops might have had, but that doesn’t really advance things any.


    Quote Quoting cdwjava
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    It may be different in parts of your state, but everywhere I know of (which includes your state), officers do not troll store videos searching for crimes. Someone reported this, a "victim" was identified (something not possible based upon a video alone), and someone put the isolated video in context. So, yeah, there's more to this.

    I never claimed the officer “trolled” looking for crimes. You are correct that something lead the cops to investigate it. But we don’t know that whatever the cops had is sufficient enough to connect the dots here to support a prosecution for theft. And while my experience has been that cops don’t generally troll for crimes, my experience has been that they do sometimes issue citations in circumstances where they lack sufficient evidence to support a conviction. The cop may think he had enough, but judges and lawyers (including the prosecutor) may well decide otherwise.

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