A quick glance toward the comments at the right will show you a disturbing trend.

Increasing numbers of you are going anonymous, creating "stunt double" identities you hide behind.

I can understand the reasoning. I'm being mailbombed right now by a spammer who obviously found my e-mail address in some public place. And it's not just spam and e-mail. Credit card outfits are now offering "stunt double" numbers, which you use once then throw away, to limit identity theft. (This is actress Nicki Aycox' stunt double, from Creature-Corners.)

The point is, again, that there are no cops on this beat, or that what cops there are care only about the worst possible crimes so the garden variety theft goes unnoticed.

The "broken windows" theory may need to apply. That was a theory first propounded in New York, over a decade ago, holding that if you let broken windows and graffiti go unnoticed and unpunished, pretty soon you'd have prostitutes and crackheads taking over.

Of course, in order to deal with petty crime you need more cops, a lot more cops. And it helps if those cops are known to the citizens, so they will cooperate.

What the Web needs, badly, is a neighborhood watch (like that of Batavia, New York, pictured.)