The Difference Between Sacramento and San Jose
I retired from the prepaid phonecard business last year. My company sold over a billion dollars worth of phonecards over the course of 20 years, many of them in California, mostly to Hispanic immigrants.
The cards were carried by our truck-drivers who delivered them to Hispanic bodegas throughout dozens of major cities. The average driver, almost exclusively Hispanic, handled from 5 to 10 thousand dollars in cash each day. Statistically, it happened that every few months at least one driver would take off with the money.
To deter others from doing likewise we vigorously pushed for the arrest and incarceration of anyone who stole from us. I have no doubt that if we did not push so hard we would have had thefts every week since we had quite a number of drivers in California alone. It should be noted that our drivers handled more cash in a day than a bank robber can expect to get in a typical bank heist.
That we were robbed by our employees is not the focus of this article. What bothered me years ago, and puzzles me to this day is that the prosecution efforts by police varied greatly from city to city. To keep this article short let me discuss the difference just between two cities, Sacramento and San Jose.
When I first started in the phonecard racket 20 years ago San Jose was a small city of less than a quarter million people; now it has almost a million (over 30% Hispanics) and is the largest city in Northern California. Until 2013 it was one of the safest of large cities in the country. However, we always had trouble getting San Jose Police to prosecute cash thefts; it seemed as if the crime was not violent enough since no weapon or force was used to obtain the money. The only way we got them to arrest the fellow is to apply pressure on higher ups in the city government.
On the other hand, the police in cities like Sacramento were quite gung ho in arresting the culprit with no pressure required. Sacramento, the sixth most populous city in California, has 21% Hispanics in a population half that of San Jose.
We had incidents in every major city in California and each city had it own peculiar intensity in pursuing a non-violent property crime. I am sure that had we been robbed at gunpoint we would have had the vigorous attention of every police department, but I could never figure out the factors contributing to various cities' police enthusiasm or lack of it in pursuing a cash crime by an employee.
This is a mystery to me as baffling as to how any intelligent person could possibly remain a Muslim after reading the Qur'an. I just can't figure it out.
