Midtown Sacramento Mountain Mike's owner says police need faster response times after break-in
SACRAMENTO — A string of break-ins in the midtown and downtown areas of Sacramento over the last two weeks has small business owners boiling.
There have been six that we know of, and not all of them are related. At least one arrest has been made, according to the Sacramento Police Department.
The most recent break-in happened at Mountain Mike's Pizza in midtown. The alarm went off, alerting both the owner and the police. The owner lives half an hour away, and by the time he got there, he didn't see any officers in sight and went into the shop alone.
"About maybe an hour 30, hour 40 minutes later, I decided to call CBS because I still didn't have anybody to help me," owner NJ Mann said.
Mann was notified of the break-in around 6 in the morning. The first attempt was by a lone person trying to smash the glass door. Five minutes later, they managed to get the door open.
The individual then briefly left, and Mann speculated it was to wait out and see if the police would show up, but that wasn't the case. Two people returned and spent time trying to open the safe. They left again and returned a few minutes later, walking across the parking lot while trying again to get the safe open. No officers were in sight. The pair then headed back inside and were successful in getting into the safe, taking everything.
"These guys were in my restaurant for 30-40 minutes. If you do not send a response team quick enough, this is going to continue. If you don't have enough police at 6 a.m., well, they know that. How are we going to fix that?" Mann said.
We asked Sacramento police about the slow response time. They say it has to do with priority calls.
"There may have been other calls that had a higher priority so those officers had to respond to those calls first, and that's really what it is. We're dealing with resources that we have on the street at that time," Officer Anthony Gamble said.
Mann said that he got a call from his alarm company at 6:13 a.m., and they immediately notified the police. Mann said he called 911 three times himself, and officers showed up around 7:45 a.m.
"We would strongly encourage our community not to enter a business that you suspect is burglarized because there may be a suspect in there. We would hate for there to be a confrontation. Call the police, update the call, 'Hey, I just got here. The window is broken. There may still be somebody in there.' That may change the priority of the call and you may get a response out and let the officers deal with that response," Gamble said.
I told Gamble that Mann said he did that three or four times.
"OK, I don't have that information. All I have is the information that's on the call. The info we have is that the call came in as a burglary alarm, which is different than a burglary in progress," he said.
"As a business owner, as a civilian who pays his taxes, what am I doing protecting myself? So what's the next step I got to do?" Mann said. "We pay taxes for the public to be served and I feel like I did not get served today."
Sacramento police say they are constantly re-evaluating the needs of the city, especially in the downtown area and add patrol when needed.
