Ten Cops Can't Recover Police Chief's Son's iPhone

Hugh Pickens writes "The Oakland Tribune reports that when Berkeley police Chief Michael Meehan's son's cell phone was stolen from a school locker in January, ten police officers were sent to track down the stolen iPhone, with some working overtime at taxpayer expense. 'If your cell phone was stolen or my cell phone was stolen, I don't think any officer would be investigating it,' says Michael Sherman, vice chairman of the Berkeley Police Review Commission, a city watchdog group. 'They have more important things to do. We have crime in the streets.' But the kicker is that even with all those cops swarming around, looking for an iPhone equipped with the Find My iPhone tracking software, police were not able to locate the phone. 'If 10 cops who know a neighborhood can't find an iPhone that's broadcasting its location, that shouldn't give you a lot of confidence in your own vigilante recovery of a stolen iProduct,' writes Alexis Madrigal. 'Just saying. Consider this a PSA: just buy a new phone.'"

Comments

Penny wide; Dollar foolish.

[cpu6502]

Probably spent close to $1000 in overtime pay just to find a $200 phone. Ridiculous. We should turn police duties over to a private company that way, when they do dumb shit like this, we can fire them and hire a different company. But as things stand now, we taxpayers are forced to eat the thousand dollar loss.