🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2Pim6.4080$S25.61820@typhoon.sonic.net>, 
spamfilter@navasgrp.dublin.ca.us says...

> I'd guess that, in my neck of the woods at least, a video of someone
> trying to open all the doors in the neighborhood would be considered
> "evidence of 'intent' necessary to prosecute."  I'd even hazard a guess
> that it would be in your neck of the woods as well.  ;-)
> 

Quite possibly so.

But in residential neighborhoods, most homes have functioning 
doorbells, and in commercial districts, most businesses have 
identifying signs indicating what their business is.

If all the buildings (commercial and residential alike) looked the 
same, displaying only their street addresses and entrance numbers, and 
if there were no doorbells, then it might look less suspicious for 
someone walking down the street to try all the doors.  

Depends on what the normative behavior is, of course, and that is to 
some degree what is being discussed here.  If, in this hypothetical 
neighborhood, people didn't simply walk the street doing the 
equivalent of window-shopping (because there are no windows to shop 
unless one opens a door, and it is socially unacceptable to open a 
door uninvited), then that's one thing.  Then it wouldn't be too hard 
to pass an ordinance outlawing "scanning" the doors to buildings.  
Such behavior would be assumed to have no useful purpose.

But if a sizeable number of people can't be persuaded to give up 
window-shopping, and a sizeable number of neighborhood merchants rely 
on window-shopping behavior to draw customers, and most residents are 
unaware that people are wandering around their living rooms looking 
for the checkout counter (or for a really appealing CD collection to 
copy), then that's something else.  You'll have a hard time passing 
the ordinance, because so many people don't see anything wrong with 
window-shopping, and because you never know when they might want to go 
door-to-door selling Girl Scout cookies.

I'm not sure which side I'm arguing for.  But I think the situation 
here is that there is a vocal group that like window-shopping and 
similar activities that do not involve picking out a specific place to 
visit ahead of time (not sure what the size of the group is), an 
overlapping group that want to provide this type of window-shopping 
experience for others without having to pay for advertising (or maybe 
even for a business license), lots of people who are completely 
unaware of the traffic in and out of their living rooms, and a growing 
number of crooks taking advantage of the situation, committing 
burglary and vandalism, and running their operations out of innocent 
peoples' living rooms.


Rebeccah