Muscatine

Sounds like the officer

Was using my tax dollars wisely. Why should the police department pay that officer overtime, when one that started at 6am could do the same thing without paying overtime?
Good job, and wise use of tax payer money as far as I can tell.

the hard part

The hard part about making that argument is that you might not feel the same if it was your shed that got broken into.

The bad thing is that most of the overtime would be caused because officers have so much paperwork to file. They'd have to file an incident report about the shed, describing the damage, etc, and they'd have to get the house owners information about what happened also.

Other youth center

Here's an article from an Iowa paper about the Nintendo Wii in a youth center in Washington County. I might have to make a visit their tonight...

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18849419&BRD=1142&PAG=461&dept_id=568956&rfi=6

The officer failed.


The officer failed miserably. A break-in was reported. That's burglary. What if the suspect(s) were still in the shed?

If the owner got injured or killed because the officer failed to clear the building where a crime was committed; that little bit of overtime would pale compared to how much the city would pay in damages to the owner's family...

What if there had been a murder in that shed that got broken into?

This particular officer left all the risk to the untrained property owner.

Where was the wise use of taxpayer dollars, again, vs. the owner's collective security?

''I gotta go home....let the day shift handle it.'' Give me a break!