How does your police department work?

This is what's going on over here. Let me know how your town would handle the same thing:

We had a theft down the street on the 7th and I helped with photographs of the cars that came in and left during the suspected time. It was the guy who was victimized that came asking for help. Not the police. Fortunately, someone else had a better video of the area when the theft took place, so they have a general idea of what the car looks like. Because the guy who was victimized was so sure that there were other houses with cameras that were in a better place to help out, I just let it go.

But he came back a second time. This weekend. And he said he wanted more video. It's just weird that he has to do this on his own. Unfortunately, he took two weeks to get back to me and the video tape was already written over by then. That's how these things work. If he had come to me earlier and let me know what car was involved, I could have made a back up during the time that particular car was coming and leaving. Without knowing which car, I would have had to record an entire day, which would have required more USB than I had available at that time.

Before he left, he gave me a rough description of the car involved. I wasn't sure if I made back-ups of the photos I gave him so I asked him to send me the jpg of the car and I would keep an eye open for it.

Well, he didn't. But I was digging in my hard drive and found copies of the photos and found the car that met his description. Just for giggles, I looked over the motion detected stills for today and noticed that the same car had driven into the development today. 15:07 to 15:10. Not fully surprised.

So, I went to send a jpg of the photo to the police department and couldn't find an email address on the website. Is that backwards or do they do that to keep everything off public record to keep the tipsters anonymous? It's not a big deal to me, except that I would want this thing resolved instead of having someone out there that feels comfortable coming and going into our development.

Obviously, I am going to call tomorrow and see what I can do. It might not even be the right car, but I am just thinking it shouldn't be this hard. From what I remember in the past this city likes to network with "trusted" civilians in the community, which makes it very slow to get anything done - right and fairly.