
DATE: Tuesday, April 1, 1997                TAG: 9704010248

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Public Safety

SOURCE: BY MARC DAVIS, STAFF WRITER

                                            LENGTH:  106 lines

KEEPING TABS ON BURGLARSIN THREE MONTHS, ONE VIRGINIA BEACH POLICE PRECINCT TRIPLED THE NUMBER OF HOME BREAK-INS SOLVED

Call them the Water Bed Burglars.

Like the Wet Bandits in the movie ``Home Alone,'' these guys had an M.O. They broke into houses in Princess Anne Plaza, stole jewelry, guns and compact discs, then slit open water beds. Homeowners returned to an ugly, soggy mess.

The burglars did this six times in November - three times with the water beds, three times without, sometimes setting off fire extinguishers, too, just for the fun of it.

It took three weeks for police to solve the crimes. Six teens were arrested, all between 15 and 19.

Score another victory for TABS, Virginia Beach's newest police program to stop burglary and truancy.

The program - TABS is for Truancy Abatement Burglary Suppression - started in September in Virginia Beach's First Precinct. It covers a huge area from Oceana Naval Air Station to the North Carolina line, from Sandbridge to the Chesapeake line.

The idea is simple but rarely done.

Take six uniformed officers. Throw them onto the streets during school hours to find truants. Talk to the kids. Find out why they aren't in school. Find out what they know about neighborhood break-ins, about neighborhood characters.

Then send the same officers into middle schools and high schools. Network with teachers. Network with students. Network with homeowners' associations.

Finally, let the same six officers investigate every home burglary in the precinct - not detectives, but uniformed officers. Have them canvas every neighborhood after every burglary, then canvas again the day after, when truants are out on the street.

The results have been remarkable.

In the first three months of TABS, police tripled the number of residential burglaries solved by arrests in the First Precinct.

``I want as many people as possible to know: If you do a burglary in the First Precinct, you're going to get caught,'' says Sgt. Frank LaPorta, who leads the squad.

Numbers back him up.

For the first three months of the TABS experiment, Sept. 5 to Dec. 5, LaPorta compared burglaries and arrests in the First Precinct to the same time in 1995. The difference was substantial.

Total reported burglaries were about the same: 102 versus 106. The results, however, were very different: nine arrests in 1995 versus 32 in 1996.

That's a clearance rate of 30 percent for three months in 1996. It compares well to the city's overall rate of clearing burglaries by arrest: 15 percent in 1995, 11 percent in 1996.

Throw in cases that solved without arrests (victims did not want to prosecute) and cases proved false after investigations, and the clearance rate for the first three months of TABS jumps to 50 percent.

That's for a crime that usually goes unsolved, in Virginia Beach or anywhere.

``People call burglars ghosts,'' LaPorta says. ``It's the hardest crime to clear. Harder than homicides.''

The TABS concept is not new. LaPorta tried it first in 1990 at the Second Precinct at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront. It helped reduce home burglaries on the North End.

He tried it again in 1991 at the Fourth Precinct in Kempsville. The program there included bike patrols through grassy trails that wind through Timberlake and Green Run. That's where police found truants - not on the streets, but in the narrow paths between back yard fences.

``We were finding a city within a city going on behind those houses,'' LaPorta recalls.

Among the burglaries solved recently by the TABS squad were two celebrated cases:

A series of break-ins in Magic Hollow, culminating in the sexual assault of a mother and daughter. Police caught a man in the attic of a vacant house. That was in January.

A resident of Hunt Club Forest videotaped a teen-ager breaking into his house after he had been burgled twice previously. That was in February.

The squad also is investigating a string of burglaries at Sandbridge, where someone is breaking into empty houses and taking things, sometimes just sleeping overnight or throwing parties.

LaPorta said he does not know if the TABS program will expand to other precincts or other cities. He does not even know how long it will continue in Virginia Beach. That will depend on whether his six officers are needed more urgently somewhere else, LaPorta said.

For now, LaPorta is bullish on the squad's early success. ``We have a lot of happy customers,'' he said. ILLUSTRATION: Photos

D. KEVIN ELLIOTT

Police officer Rick Esposito speaks to a teen-age driver from

Norfolk.

Officer Esposito pats down a teen who skipped school. Esposito

returned the youth to Ocean Lakes High School.

Graphics

WHAT IS TABS?

Developed in September by the 1st Precinct in Virginia Beach, TABS

stands for Truancy Abatement Burglary Suppression

The Virginian-Pilot

HOME BURGLARIES