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N.C.'s a great place to be a burglar
The Charlotte area is one of the best places in the country for ambitious professionals to make their fortunes. No, not in banking — in burglary.
Here's why, and how you too can make a buck stealing people's stuff with very little risk of prison time. Other states will send you away for a few years for a home break-in. But in North Carolina, you get what I call a "felony freebie." The first time you are convicted of a home break-in, if there is nothing else on your record, you get probation.
The police know this and won't spend a lot of time trying to solve a home break-in if it appears to be a one-hitter, preferring to think of it as a matter between the homeowner and his insurance company. With our state and local crime labs backed up, wasting time trying to process burglary evidence on a thief who will likely get probation doesn't make sense.
Years of crime reporting has taught me some valuable lessons about how hardened criminals who are hip to how state laws work burglarize others for fun and profit and how you can, too.
What you don't want to do is hit the same neighborhoods repeatedly in the same car. That attracts news media attention, which in turn motivates the police to catch you. And of course you'll want to avoid gun-wielding homeowners.
Should the unthinkable happen and you get caught, you'll do probation the first time out and possibly the second.
In 2009, the Democratic-controlled legislature slashed the sentences for many crimes, including property crime. The now Republican-controlled legislature just did it again in June. True, they also created a new habitual offender status for burglars, but even under that, you could still theoretically do up to three separate burglaries and get just probation if you play your cards right and not have a prior record. On the fourth, you'll likely serve something like a year and a half to three years.
"I used to say that we will be giving habitual offenders significant time," Mecklenburg County District Attorney Andrew Murray told News 14. "I'm not certain I can say 'significant time' in every case now."
See? You'd pretty much have to be a cracked-out dope fiend to be sloppy enough to get caught and convicted multiple times by police detectives who don't want to sit through court hearings only to watch you get probation. Heck, a trio of heroin addicts burglarized south Charlotte in broad daylight in a bright red Jeep Cherokee for months — even with television news doing weekly reports on them. When police finally made an arrest in the cases earlier this year, they got the wrong guy. They eventually let him go, but in the process they bungled the case so badly that the charges had to be thrown out against the actual suspects.
That's not to say police here don't arrest people for this crime. They do. But if you're smart, you'll likely get away with it because property crime really isn't taken seriously in North Carolina.
How else can you tell the Republican-controlled state legislature isn't serious about property crime? They just voted to close another four prisons, even though a Pew study showed North Carolina has the fewest prison beds per capita in the South. They claim they did this because they are broke. But the same legislature has no problem committing to tens of millions of dollars for trains while our crammed-to-the-gills prisons are being shut down.
Judges know this, and feel pressured to sentence people to the lowest punishment possible on the sentencing grid to keep the prisons from overflowing.
By the way, those same North Carolina state legislators aren't home a couple hundred days a year while they serve in Raleigh. The calendar with their work schedule is published online on at www.ncga.state.nc.us.
If an enterprising young burglar started his or her career in their living rooms, I'm sure things would quickly change.
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