See something, say something… but to whom?

Law enforcement agencies are always telling the community that it is their duty to say something when they see something, urging them to become snitches for free, but when someone does do the right thing and says something, they all pass the buck, either because they are afraid of the consequences or because they are too lazy to take action.
Just this week a resident of Ward One reported a van parked in front of his home for several days and every city employee started passing the buck.
First, it was Code Enforcement when an officer by the name of Lorie referred the caller to Parking Enforcement and refused to hear that a similar event occurred a year ago when Officer Tony Roger summoned the owner of the house for parking his own car, legally plated, registered and insured because “cars cannot be parked on public streets for a long period of a time.”
Parking Enforcement almost duplicated the arrogant attitude of Code Enforcement or worse, because the woman who claimed her name is Melissa refused to transfer the call to a Parking Enforcement Officer, and when the Ward One resident finally got to talk to an alleged supervisor who said her name was Evelyn Valdez, she referred the call to another department that knew nothing about how to handle a situation like that and abruptly terminated the call.
According to the Ward One resident, Evelyn Valdez called him back and told him to call the constable, maybe ignorant that the constable’s office does not answer the telephone at any time; callers have to leave a message and they will return the telephone call “whenever possible.”
The sixty-five-year resident of the city of Las Vegas trying to be a positive citizen, frustrated, called the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s non-emergency number, and the rude telephone operator told the caller that he needed to provide the plate number of the car, which the caller did not have, until our Las Vegas Tribune reporter drove all the way across the city and took a photo of the suspicious van.
A telephone call by the newspaper to Ward One Councilwoman Lois Tarkanian was answered, as always, with a recorded message and no one from the Ward One Councilwoman’s office ever returned the telephone call asking for a comment on what a citizen should do when they see something and did say something and is then given the runaround.
When asked why she thinks the Ward One Councilwoman did not return the phone call, the newspaper’s General Manager stated, “It is not surprising; Tarkanian doesn’t like this newspaper because our boss, Rolando Larraz, called her a useless elected official, and during an open city meeting, on the record, she accused him of being a racist.”
“Events like this one make people lose interest in being part of the community and acting like a member of the community by seeing something and saying something because passing the buck is not protecting each other and is not protecting our community,” said the newspaper’s founder, Rolando Larraz.
At some time around or after nine in the evening a dispatcher with LVMPD called the Ward One resident to ask about the suspicious vehicle parked in front of his home. The dispatcher, by the name of Madi, asked what made him believe that the vehicle in front of his home was suspicious; the man tried to explain to Madi that nowadays everything is suspicious — if a child can walk into a school with a handgun and shoot classmates; if a man can drive a plane into a landmark building at the Twin Towers and kill thousands of innocent people; if a nutcase can rent a room on the twenty-fourth floor of the Las Vegas Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino and start shooting and kill fifty-eight party-goers, anything is possible and everything can be classified as
suspicious. Dispatcher Madi must not have liked what the man on the other end of the line was saying because she rudely and without a word terminated the call.