Locked But Not Locked Down

I work for a municipal police department, and part of my job is to look up security camera footage for our public parking garage in cases when a car gets broken into. We don’t handle those cases ourselves; criminal offenses aren’t delegated from the state (actually canton, since I’m from Switzerland, but they mean the same thing) level to the municipal level, at least not in our state. I usually get a request from the state police to hand over footage between certain dates and times.

This one time, though, our dispatch operators forwarded a call by a citizen asking for said footage, because when she came back to her car, she noticed someone had rummaged around in it.

I told her that I legally couldn’t access any of the footage without a proper report being filed with the state police, and only they could demand the footage, not the individual who owns the car. She said that she didn’t really want to open up a criminal investigation about the whole thing. She just wondered how someone was able to enter her car that she had locked.

Turns out she drives a convertible and forgot to put the roof back up before leaving the car. Regardless, she was still mystified how someone would manage to get into that car.