Here comes the moment when I photograph my own car with a broken window.
Around five in the morning, two teenagers, according to witnesses, smashed the window of my beloved car and turned everything inside upside down.
They were scared off by employees of a nearby business. There was not much worth stealing anyway: a stack of papers, baseball caps, chargers, bottles of water and antifreeze, tissues, and all the other random junk that has been riding around in the trunk with you for years for no particular reason.
The harsh reality of life in an American metropolis begins here. The NYPD simply does not respond to calls like this. I waited for almost four hours, and no one ever showed up.
The logic is understandable. If the police respond to reports like these six to eight hours later, by the time the patrol arrives, there will be no one left to file a report: the complainant will have left to get their car repaired. No report, no problem. No paperwork, and the statistics stay clean.
The result is the broken windows effect, both in the literal and figurative sense of the phrase: complete impunity and not even the possibility of accountability for regular robberies, against the backdrop of broken car windows appearing regularly throughout the neighborhood. And this is a fairly decent ZIP code, not some particularly dangerous part of the city.
As for the financial side of things, insurance does not help much either. Even if an incident like this is covered, the deductible — usually around $500–$1,000 — will be higher than the cost of the window itself.
A deductible in insurance is the portion of the damage that you have to pay yourself before the insurance company covers the rest.
No conclusion to this post. I cannot even attach any statistics because New York does not classify this type of crime as a separate category.
Take care of yourselves!
