Last Updated on: 30th December 2016, 09:48 am
There are good times to shoplift and there are bad times to shoplift. There are also, as Shane Alexander and Jason Vantress are nowwell aware, dirt awful downright shitty times to shoplift. Times like Fred Meyer’s annual “Shop With a Cop” back to school event, for instance.
Our hapless heroes of bumbling burglary were not unaware of what was going on at the store, in fact there’s no way they could have missed it. As the story points out, “Mounted patrol officers were out front. canine patrol were teaming around and about 60 other uniformed officers from assistant chiefs and commanders to patrol officers and traffic cops were inside.” So yeah, they knew.
But where most of us would see a giant flashing not today sign, Alexander and Vantress saw an advantage.
“Initially, they said they were freaked out by all the cops there,”police spokesperson Pete Simpson said. “But then, they thought it would be a good time to steal, that police would be distracted.”
They weren’t.
While officers were helping out the kids, store security alerted the police they had their eyes on two young men packing their own backpacks with merchandise.
“Two guys came in and were picking through goods, cutting tags off and loading up their backpacks with blenders, shoes, clothes and tools,” said Sgt. Pete Simpson, police spokesman.
A couple of Portland officers assisted security in making an arrest, as a clown making balloons continued to entertain the children gathered for the special shopping event.
Hopefully some kids learned a lesson in common sense that day, or at the very least a lesson in how not to turn one’s life of crime into a violent death of WMD grade stupidity.
“Common sense didn’t play into their decision-making today,” spokesman Obvious said in summation. “As is so often the occasion with crooks, they think they’re smarter than the average bear, and they’re not.”