From the Pioneer Press’ Eagan Police Calls:
Blind beef bandits breakout, “Boo-ya!” before bolting:
Shoplifting: It was reported April 24 that a man stole about $30 worth of steaks from Cub Foods, 1940 Cliff Lake Road. A witness reported seeing a female in a waiting car. The couple gave each other a high-five, apparently thinking they had not been seen.
According to this article in the Pioneer Press, Burnsville has upped its enforcement of prostitution within the city limits, presumably to clean up the hotels so that they can attract out of state vacationers and those coming for the Republican National Convention.
As many of you know, I have been closely following the Dakota County Criminal Complaints and archive them in text format which makes them easy to read and more importantly, search. After reading the article about how Burnsville has stepped up enforcement, I wanted to see just how many criminal complaints had shown up from Burnsville since I started watching back in January of 2008 compared with other municipalities in Dakota County.
After all of this stepped up enforcement, Burnsville has only had two criminal complaints filed since January of 2008 while Eagan has three. You can check out Burnsville’s complaints (PDF warning) here and here. You can view Eagan’s here, here, and here. To be fair to Burnsville, Eagan’s three complaints all stem from the same crime while Burnsville had to go out and beat the bushes twice to get their two collars. As you can tell from those complaints and the article linked above, both Burnsville and Eagan are using CraigsList postings to track down prostitutes and bring them, their pimps and related individuals to justice.
The PiPress article quotes some arrest stats from Burnsville’s enhanced prostitution enforcement:
Prostitution stings: 9
Males arrested for soliciting prostitution: 34
Females arrested for prostitution: 15
Male arrested for prostitution: 1
Males arrested for promotion of prostitution: 2
Total arrests: 52
While I’m not seeing anything close to those numbers since January, perhaps they don’t show up there or they haven’t gotten that far along? In the article Burnsville Police Chief Bob Hawkins was paraphrased as saying, “he hopes the prostitution stings will eventually send the message that Burnsville is a city cracking down on prostitutes, johns and pimps.” Personally, while 52 total arrests is great I’m sure it isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. If anything, they are just going to get smarter and stay the hell off CraigsList.
There is some new “News” in the South Metro but very little that’s worth an entire post so I figured I would give everyone a small taste of some tidbits that have shown up since yesterday that you might want to check out yourselves:
1. Deputy Joshua Williams, the Dakota County Sheriff’s Deputy who killed Billy Wallace when he cut across several lanes of traffic and clipped Wallce’s motorcycle while en route to a domestic disturbance call in Farmington without his emergency lights or siren activated, was convicted of “careless driving” in Scott County.
2. The Metropolitan Council has sweetened the Lakeville transit deal with an offer for $24 million in improvements to the I-35 and Cedar Ave transit corridors. Enhancements would include adding another HOV lane from Burnsville Pkwy to “The Split”, construction of a larger park and ride at the current location near Kenrick and 167th, peak hour bus routes planned and another park and ride further down Cedar between 179th and 185th. Lakeville will be holding a public open house on April 29th to discuss the deal.
3. Two people were arrested for fatally wounding a 22 year old Prior Lake man during a hit and run that occurred back in early April.
4. Two South Metro students were expelled for purchasing replica swords on a choir trip to the UK. Some believe the punishment is too severe but administrators believe it was necessary to keep up their zero tolerance policy on weapons.
Obviously Eagan’s Eric Syverson didn’t do so well in school or hasn’t been paying attention to teacher salaries, because he and a friend delivered 22 letters to various male teachers around the South Metro in an attempt to blackmail them into forking over up to $23,000 to cover his own supposed blackmail debts.
Apparently Eric and his friend Joseph Schultz hand delivered the letters demanding $1000, stored in Ziploc bags, be dropped in four different parks otherwise rumors would spread of inappropriate behavior with either male or female students and/or DVDs of adult and child pornography would mysteriously appear.
After the letters were reported, officers from multiple jurisdictions tracked the suspect when he went out to pickup from the drop points and Syverson was eventually picked up and transported to the Apple Valley PD where he admitted to the blackmail but only because he himself was being blackmailed.
Genius: blackmail teachers for $1000 each… There is no better group to try and extort money from but our underpaid secondary educators — perhaps if he was smart he would have at least waited until they received their $1200 “economic stimulus package” as he would have had a much better shot of those poor fuckers having the $1000 he was looking to gank from them.
You can check out his photo in this article and for more info check here (Star Tribune), here (Pioneer Press), here (Rosemount Town Pages) and here (Dakota County Felony Complaint, PDF warning).
That’s not a knife, this is a knife.
Samaroo was asked if he had any needles or anything sharp that the officer should be concerned about. Samaroo replied that he had a knife. When asked where, Samaroo reached into his waistband and started to produce a machete with a 16-inch blade.
Jerry Fletcher seems to have taken up residence in Eagan (from the Star Tribune’s South Metro Police Blotter):
Suspicious activity. A woman in the 3700 block of Red Robin Lane called police for a friend who believes that she is being spied on, because there’s “some sort of wiring” going between several houses on the street. The woman said there are strange things happening with her friend’s cell phone and she suspects the phone has been tampered with.
