I spent a good part of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday during daylight hours, working on vehicles, getting things done, making progress.  Each night I looked on the internet for parts, vehicle problems that were similar to what I had, and repairs that other people had done.

This morning, Memorial Day, when I went outside my apartment building to go to my truck, I saw that someone had tried to steal my mountain bike from the bed of my truck.  I had a cable lock going through the bicycle frame and front wheel, because the front wheel has a quick-release lever.  The front wheel was removed and hanging there, and the bike was pulled out and hanging there.

This really made me angry, for a whole bunch of reasons.  I keep a lot of tools and equipment in my vehicles.  I use these tools and equipment regularly, and they need to stay in my vehicle.  Things like a battery jump start box, battery charger, digital multi-meter, compressed air tank, socket set, cordless tool set, dremel tools, other tools, spare tires, shop jack, and so forth.  This truck got stolen in Dickinson in 2016, and $2,000 worth of tools and equipment were removed from it.

When this truck got stolen in Dickinson in 2016, the tools and equipment that were taken from it, plus the four new tires that were taken off of it, plus the time and money that I spent driving around from Richardton to New England to Belfield looking for my truck and handing out flyers, this all cost me a loss of about $3,000.

The person who stole my truck and later abandoned it, he is a long-time, well-known car thief in the Dickinson area, and a drug addict.  He spends most of his time in jail and in prison.  Getting arrested, being placed in jail, and going to prison are not a deterrent to him, nor will he ever, ever be able to pay any restitution for what he stole.

So now, I have a cable lock going through my truck steering wheel, a cable lock going through my spare tires, and a cable lock going through my mountain bike.  I have to double check that my tool box is locked, and I have to double check that anything of value is locked inside of a locked chest, which is cable locked to the seat frame.

But all of this locking everything up, all of this worry about locking up everything that I own, trying to keep the tools and equipment that I use and need, it’s like a losing battle here in Dickinson.  Living in Dickinson, it’s always, always one step forward, and two steps back.

Low-life, scum-of-the-earth thieves still roam the streets of downtown Dickinson at night trying to steal things out of people’s vehicles.  They aren’t afraid of the Police, they aren’t afraid of going to jail, and they aren’t afraid of going to prison.  The Police, the Judges, the jail, and prison aren’t bad enough or severe enough for them to be afraid, these things aren’t a deterrent to them.

I have to be careful about what I say, but I would like to kill the next person that I catch trying to steal something from me or vandalize something that I own.  I know that I would probably get caught, that I would go to prison for years, maybe life, maybe get the death penalty.  The thieves in Dickinson have no fear of getting caught, they will keep on stealing because their punishment is never severe enough, so I would just like to kill them right on the spot.

I called the Dickinson Police this morning, and an officer came and he looked at what I had going on.  The Police Officer suggested to me that I get a trail camera.  I went to Menards and I bought a high-definition security camera system for $190.  I mounted the outdoor weatherproof high-definition security camera on my apartment balcony, aimed at where I park my vehicles.

The power and video cable from the outdoor camera go to a DVR inside my apartment that has a 1 terabyte hard drive.  The default operation of the outdoor camera and DVR is to record video whenever motion is detected.  However, I changed the settings so that the outdoor camera video is recorded continuously.  There is enough memory for the camera video to be recorded continuously for eighty hours before the DVR automatically begins overwriting the older video.

Now, I sit here in my living room glancing at my television screen, which shows what is going on in the apartment building parking lot and out on the street.  This afternoon, I went over to one of my neighbor’s house to tell him what had happened, and he and his wife told me that a luggage carrier had been stolen off of a truck one block away earlier this week.

The second neighbor that I spoke to this afternoon, he told me what else had been stolen this past week in this neighborhood.  The third neighbor that I spoke to, he showed me the Nissan car that had been broken into last week.  The first two neighbors that I spoke to this afternoon, they had an idea where the thieves are coming from, and this area is where I thought they were coming from too.

There is a very wretched and distressed apartment building, and several very distressed houses that have been subdivided into little cubby holes for the drug addicts to live in, that pretty much guarantee that we will always have crime in this neighborhood downtown.  The drug addicts come out after midnight and wander around the neighborhood looking for things to steal.

Though these drug addicts wandering the streets at night in Dickinson attract the attention of the Police, what are the Police going to do besides asking them a few questions about what they are doing and where they are going?  The way that Dickinson is now, probably 25% of the people living downtown have had a drug conviction in the past.  With all these drug addicts walking the streets after midnight, each claiming that they are going somewhere, what are the Police going to do?