Kaaawa, Hawaii.
It was one of 10 burglaries reported during the first
two weeks of March in Sector 4 of the Honolulu
Police Department's Windward Oahu district, a
relatively thinly populated country district running
from Kaaawa to Kawela Bay.
The crime itself wasn't anything special, just a run-
of-the-mill burglary, in which someone broke in
and "went shopping in our house." It's something
that happens on Oahu 5,000 times or more in a
given year.
But "our" burglary was different because a hidden
camera captured several reasonably good digital
photos of the burglar, caught in the act as he went
through our house, and I turned to social media to
identify and track him down. It led to a wild three-
day experience in which the new world of
technology and social media took on the old
problem of everyday crime.
Smile! You're Now a Crime Statistic
It's Friday. The end of a long week. We arrived
home in the late afternoon. I was first through the
front door, and immediately saw that the sliding
door out to the back deck was open. The cats,
normally inside cats, were lounging around on the
deck. It took only a few seconds to realize this
meant someone had broken in.
The immediate reaction is a sinking feeling, an
anticipatory sense of loss. You don't yet know what
was taken, but you can imagine what it might
include. And the whole process of being
burglarized is doubly depressing, because after the
crime and the initial sense of loss comes the
bureaucracy, adding up the dollars and cents,
dealing with the police, with your insurance
company, then facing the decisions about what to
replace, and what to just try to forget about. And
then there are the "what if's." What if we had
installed an alarm? What if I had stayed home that
day? What if we had hidden that prized item away.
What if… The self-recriminations can drag you
down as much as the crime itself.
As we went through the house, the places that had
been searched were pretty obvious. Drawers pulled
open, containers tossed around. It makes you
alternately angry, then depressed. Then it leaves
you just sort of empty.
We should have called the police immediately, but
it was Friday night, we were scheduled to have
dinner with friends, and the burglar — along with
our stuff — was long gone. So we waited until the
next morning to call HPD. I doubt it made us great
company that evening.
A Photo Finish
This isn't the first time we've been burglarized
since moving to Kaaawa 26 years ago. After
someone walked off with a laptop computer in
2007, I installed a small, wireless camera that
automatically starts taking pictures when it
detects motion in the room, and uploads them to a
secret spot in the "cloud." The camera requires a
wireless network to connect to the internet, but
doesn't need to be connected to a computer to
function.
Once the initial shock and depression wore off, I
remembered the camera. Before long, I retrieved
the photos, each automatically time and date
stamped, and got a good sense of what had
happened.
The burglar first appeared on camera about 11:52
a.m., just minutes before noon. Although burglary
is usually a young man's crime, this burglar looked
to be around 50. He wore dirty jeans — as if fresh
from work on a construction site — a gray t-shirt
and athletic shoes. Wrap-around sunglasses were
pushed up on his head. To avoid leaving finger
prints, he wore makeshift gloves made out of
plastic bags that were taped over his hands. Once
inside the house, he moved quickly and silently
through the living room and kitchen, then moved
down the hall to our bedroom, emerging several
minutes later carrying a pillow case holding items
he had taken. Then he made another quick look
around the living room, stopping to dump a small
bowl of coins — several months of accumulated
pocket change — into the pillow case, then added a
camera he spotted on a table across the room. And,
finally, he made his exit out to the deck, graciously
leaving the door open for the cats to enjoy. He was
quick and efficient, in and out of the house within
ten minutes. None of our neighbors noticed
anything unusual. And the cats didn't say a word.
After first retrieving the digital photos, I printed a
couple and walked the nearby streets, asking
neighbors if they recognized the man. One thought
the person looked familiar. I took note. Others took
long looks, then shook their heads. Nothing.
So I sat down and did two things. First, I prepared a
4-by-6-inch photo of the burglar to pass out and
post in the neighborhood, and sent it to Costco to
have several dozen digital prints made. And then I
posted the photo and a brief description of what
happened on my own personal website, as well as
on a website featuring occasional news about
Kaaawa, with additional links posted on Twitter and
Facebook.
I was stunned by the result. Even before we had a
chance to pick up the printed photographs, the
pictures of the burglar at work, and my call to help
identify him, had gone viral. Twitter seems to have
been effective in getting the word to the news
media and to key opinion leaders, who then
retweeted details to their own networks. But
Facebook seems to have had by far the most reach,
as people saw the information and reposted it,
quickly taking this from a local quest to a search
with national reach.
How effective was social media? Here's one
indicator. The number of page views on my blog
jumped from a daily average of about 2,000 to
58,857 on Sunday, and another 17,818 on Monday,
undoubtedly generated by the reposting of
information with links back to my original post.
That's a pretty dramatic reach, achieved in just a
matter of hours. And it made the difference.
Mainstream news media then picked up the story,
spurred on by the online response the issue had
been getting. And the broadcast news coverage, in
turn, reinforced the social media presence.
A phone call came in early Sunday morning from
Las Vegas, where several former Hawaii residents
had compared notes and said they believed the
burglar was a Hauula man. They provided his name
as well as a good description of where he lives.
Phone calls, emails, and online comments continued throughout the day, and into the evening, with quite a number of other people pointing to the same Hauula resident as the person in the photo. Several other names came up as well,
including a former Kaaawa resident recently seen surfing nearby.
Case Solved!
It was social media that broke the case open.
Late Sunday afternoon, just 24-hours after I first
posted the burglar's photo online, a man called
and, without identifying himself, said he knew the
person in the photo. He said he wanted to talk to
him before saying more. I encouraged him to call
me back any time, but wasn't sure if this was any
more solid than the other leads that had been
offered.
He called back a few hour later. He was, I learned,
one of the burglar's brothers. He had been alerted
to the photograph by a daughter living on the
mainland, who saw it on Facebook and thought she
recognized her uncle. With the photograph getting
such broad exposure, it would have been hard for
the family to look the other way. And, thankfully,
they didn't.
While crowdsourcing made a tremendous
contribution to getting out the word about the
search for the burglar, it wasn't as successful at
making the actual identification. The burglar, as it
turns out, was not the Hauula man mentioned
most often by those online. Instead, it was the
former Kaaawa resident, identified by just a couple
of people who seemed to be swimming against the
tide. He was someone who had done a lot of work
as a neighborhood handyman back around 2002,
and who we had hired back then to do repairs on
our deck. We later learned, according to rumors
circulating in the neighborhood, that he might not
be a novice when it comes to the art of the burglary. And now he had come back, after more than a decade.
Just before 9 p.m. on Sunday night, I was standing
in our driveway, in the darkness, meeting with the
burglar's brother. He said the family had confronted the man, who admitted to the burglary.
He then reached into his truck and presented me
with a dark pillowcase which, on later examination,
was filled with almost everything that had been
stolen. A few items, those with any gold content,
had already been pawned, but he said the family
would do their best to retrieve and return those
items as well.
I believe the man's brother was genuinely humbled
and deeply pained by the experience, and was
telling the honest truth when he said the family is
now trying to "do the right thing." He said the
family had been trying to support their brother as
he dealt with drug dependence and past criminal
charges. It's a struggle many local families will
relate to, I'm sure. But what is the "right thing"
under the circumstances, for the family, for the
burglar, for the victims, and for the community? I
don't pretend to know. It's something we'll all be
grappling with going forward.
We were obviously very lucky to solve the crime in
a timely fashion, and also to get most of our stolen
property back. But technology, such as our small
security camera, combined with the long reach of
social media, obviously provides new ways of
responding to routine crimes of this kind. A small
self-installed camera obviously won't provide as
much protection as a commercial alarm system,
and neither can provide absolute security. But it
doesn't cost much and, as this has shown, can be
quite effective. That said, I repeat–we were very
lucky. Your mileage may vary.
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