Stolen laptop prompts Commoner reporter to investigate

Kristy Hutter
kristyhutter@gmail.com

Combine an expensive, easily transportable gadget with an unlocked bay window on the first floor and you get a thief’s dream.

Laptops are a growing commodity among Halifax robbers, and many of those who suffer at the hands of these thieves are students.

Take the most recent victim of this heinous crime: me, a University of King’s College student living two blocks away from campus with too small a bank account to replace the most expensive thing she owns.

After a hard day in The Commoner newsroom, I came home to find an empty space where the keeper of all schoolwork, photos, and music sat a mere six hours before.

Of course, theft was initially out of the question, but when I searched my roommate’s room and discovered her laptop (and both of our chargers) missing, I stopped denying it – we had been robbed.

The police officer who came to investigate told me break-ins resulting in stolen laptops happen several times a day.

He said criminals typically wipe the hard drive clean and then sell it on the Internet. So I didn’t have to worry about my initial reaction – that some mean man was scouring pictures of my latest escapades downtown, or my last beach vacation in Georgia.

Halifax Regional Police spokesperson Brian Palmeter said student houses are the main targets of these crimes. He said daylight robberies may go unnoticed because most people are at work or school during the day and, even if an onlooker were to see a young person crawling through a student house’s window, it may just look like he or she was locked out.

“It’s not difficult to determine which houses are student houses,” he said. “Whether it be the Canadian flag in the window for curtains or the beer bottles on the porch, they are traditionally student houses.So in a lot of cases, they are easier marks.”

So what happens to a laptop after it has been taken from its rightful owner?

If the police recover a stolen laptop, they take it in and process it as evidence for the crime. They may not even be able to give it back to its lawful owner.

Palmeter said it is important to record your laptop’s serial number and even mark it up in any way that may make it uniquely identifiable, or else there is no way of telling it is yours.

Most of the time, they are not recovered. He said they usually don’t end up in pawnshops and are typically sold on eBay. He said
computer thieves don’t have to worry about the laptop’s resale value so they take anything they can get.

“They will go for as low as a hundred bucks because whatever they sell it for is pure profit.”

The most personalized item
debt-ridden students own is snatched and sold for $100 and they are then obligated to scrounge up a grand, or more, to buy a new one.

There should be an “I’ve been robbed” discount at PCPC, the Dalhousie University campus computer store – robbery being a common reason for new laptop purchases, according to one salesperson.

Some may consider laptop thievery a blessing in disguise. Take my roommate, for example. She is ecstatic with her new MacBook Pro. After all, her five-year-old Dell beast was stolen along with my 2 year-old MacBook. Yes, it is unfortunate that her pictures and music are being emptied into the unknown black hole of computer “recycle bins” (probably at this very moment), but she needed a new one anyway.

Perhaps it was the term “violated” that really got me thinking about being robbed. A stranger entered our home through the only window we forgot to lock that day, lifted my laptop, maybe even taking a moment to admire pictures of my friends and family that adorn my dresser on his or her way out, and left me broke (more so than before) and memory-less.

So please, fellow students living in this city, lock your windows and back up your data because some day, it could all be gone.

And fool the thieves – buy some real curtains.