Written on 26 February 2022 and published on 28 February 2022
Location: San Fernando Valley, California

Image: “Dandy Pickpockets Diving: Scene Near St. James Palace,” by Isaac Robert Cruikshank, 2 December 1818, in Wikimedia Commons … https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dandy_pickpockets,_diving.jpg … public domain

• VIDEO BY ALICE
• SUMMARY OF THE VIDEO

Dear Ones,

Here is something to look out for in the Home Depots here in the San Fernando Valley. There is a Summary after the video …

VIDEO BY ALICE

SUMMARY OF THE VIDEO

Dear Ones,

Hello, Dear Ones, It’s Alice, the Crime Stopper.

In the 1970s, I and co-author Vivo Bennett came up with a book entitled “1001 Ways to Avoid Getting Mugged, Murdered, Robbed, Raped, or Ripped Off.” That book is no longer in print … (I see used copies can be purchased on Amazon.com … Note my pen name was ‘Cricket Clagett’ back then.) … but I continue to give crime stopper tips from time to time, and here is one …

In recent visits to various Home Depots here in the San Fernando Valley, I intuitively sensed the presence of pickpockets. Some seemed to be standing solo, staring at bins on a particular aisle for a long time … just staring at one bin as if deep in thought.

Others were walking from here to there, in various aisles, almost aimlessly. It seemed as if they had no intention to purchase anything; they were just walking from one aisle to the next, slowly.

I was carrying a backpack. As you may know, a person has to be very careful with a backpack, because it is a favorite ploy of pickpockets to come up behind a person and unzip their backpack and take their wallet or whatever else they may find of value there.

So whenever someone goes past me, and I am wearing a backpack, I slip the backpack off of one shoulder and around to one side, and hold onto it, with my arm crossed over it, to make sure nothing like that happens.

I noticed that I was doing that over and over again, in the Home Depot. I turned around, and I noticed that there were an improbable number of people slowly walking towards the back of my backpack while I stood in the aisle looking at the products.

They would be coming from this direction, and then the other direction, and then the other direction again, like that … like a stream of people. I had run into nothing like that elsewhere in the store, you see? It happened whenever I turned around with the backpack and faced the product in the aisle and began to figure out what to buy.

I came up with the thought that there might be a homing system … someone might notice a prospect or a mark in the store that looked like ‘easy pickins’ and was absorbed in the product … and might have a way, through their handheld, of letting other people know what aisle and where to go to, until one of them had managed the ‘heist’.

So I would be very careful in Home Depot. It is a good place to get lost in and dream about home improvements and things like that, but it is also a good place to have your wallet lifted or your purse lifted or your backpack unzipped and something missing from it in a New York minute, I feel.

I have been thinking it over, why it is that I am running into this difficulty at Home Depot, here in the San Fernando Valley, but not at the Lowes. At first I thought that maybe it had to do with the arrangement of the shelves in the stores, because the place where that was happening was a little more secluded from the view of the main cashiers at the front of the store. Then I realized that there is a similar area in the Lowes, but that nothing is going on there.

And it occurred to me that it could have to do with the fact that day laborers are stationed outside, in the parking lot, and at the entrance to the parking lot of the Home Depot. And it may also have something to do with the COVID crisis and the level of affluence of people in Los Angeles right now, because that affluence may have been impinged upon a little by the recent COVID crisis.

If day laborers are allowed to be in the parking lots of places, store personnel might want to be on the alert for petty thefts taking place within the store.

That is all for now.

God bless you all,
And keep you safe,
And be with you
Through all your days.

In love, light and joy,
I Am of the Stars

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law enforcement, crime and crime prevention, Los Angeles, United States,