Brainerd Residents Question Police Response Time
Members of one Brainerd neighborhood want answers after neighbors witness a burglary in progress, call 911 repeatedly, and then watch the the bad guys get away.
People who live in the neighborhood say they've had a string of burglaries recently and one home owner says it's not acceptable for the police to take twenty minutes to respond after receiving four 911 phone calls, all while someone is inside of her home.
"This window was busted out and all the woodwork around it was all over the ground the glass was broken on the ground," Ashlee Beene says while showing us her newly repaired back door.
Beene shows us where two men broke into her home on Oriole Drive in broad daylight. She tells us her next door neighbor noticed the men looking in the windows and called 9-1-1.
"Came back around and they left, drove around the block," Beene says. "Our neighbor followed them."
Beene says her neighbor saw the men do a lap around the block, come back, and then break into the home. You can still see wood splinters and shattered glass everywhere.
"They saw them carry out the TV, the XBOX, everything," Beene says.
That's when Beene says her neighbor called 911 again.
Beene tells us that her neighbors were so suspicious that they actually decided to drive by the house and use the camera on their cell phone to take a picture of the suspect's car while they were still inside the house.
The picture shows an older blue car with no license plate sitting the driveway, but that car disappeared before police arrived on the scene.
"Very aggravating," Beene says. "That so many calls where made to 911, I mean the police had a chance definitely."
So today we asked the candidates running for the District 6 City Council seat what can prevent this kind of problem in the future.
"The call load for sector three is the heaviest call load in the city so we need to make sure the adequate number of police and the highest caliber of police to address these issues," Marti Rutherford, a candidate for the District 6 City Council seat, says.
"I think that neighbors are doing a wonderful job of looking out for each other and actually we in the neighborhoods are apart of the system and I think we probably need to rethink the way we do our policing to meet the needs of a poor economy," Councilwoman Carol Berz, who is running for reelection, says.
"They said honestly they were short staffed and it was shift change time," Beene says. "Was that acceptable to you?" we ask. "No," she says quickly.
We called the Police Department's spokesperson several times today to get their side of this story and never received a phone call back.
