Home Sweet Home

(From the City of Bay Village website – except I fixed the spelling and grammatical errors. Come on, people.)
Land Area. Bay Village is 4.52 square miles in area.
Population. Bay Village was home to an estimated 16,087 people during 2000.
Educated Population. Bay Village has a highly educated population. Almost 1/2 of the population age 25 and older in 1990 had a bachelor or graduate degree.
Professional Community. The high education level is reflected in the occupational makeup of the community. Over 50% of the employed population, age 16 and older, in 1990 were employed as managers or professionals.
Housing Stock. Over 1/3 of Bay Village's housing units were built in the 1950's. Another 28% of the City's housing stock was developed before 1950.
Weather. Bay Village enjoys a four season climate and is affected by the temperature and winds over Lake Erie. Due to Bay Village's location, winter snowfall is much less than suburbs to the east of Cleveland.

In other words…a small, lakeside town that doesn’t see much action besides the people we bust for speeding as they pass through.

Cut to this morning. Drop the girls off at the sitter, who lives in a very quiet neighborhood of small ranch homes. Head back out towards the main Lake Road. As I’m driving, I vaguely acknowledge more cars than usual parked in the street. I slow down some more for a car coming the other direction and notice two of the parked cars are patrol cars and they are parked facing each other on the same side. Weird.

I look up to see some uniforms in the driveway – one speaking into his walkie-talkie (because that’s what I call them. I am ten.). I notice the other has a vest over his white shirt. So I look at the house where I see two more officers, backs against the home on either side of the front picture window with guns drawn. Big guns – not, I-just-un-holstered-this-sidearm-for-the-first-time-in-my-life, but rifle-like weapons (of which I know nothing about).

This all played out in the two seconds it took me to pass the house without drawing attention to the fact that I was slowing down to stare. But really…we’re talking about a town whose police see so little action that all three on-duty squad cars showed up when my friend got in a fender-bender in front of my house.

Just yesterday I found out that a man from Strongsville pulled up to a 14-year-old girl by the Nature Center and demanded she get in his car. She luckily ran away and was able to describe him and his car to the police who picked him up 10 minutes later in the next park over.

There has been a rash of car break-ins for the last year. (Well, this actually makes sense, because why wouldn’t you come to the town described above and break into our cars.)

What is happening?

This is Patricia Heaton’s hometown, damnit. We’re above all this.

Oh wait, we did have that nasty Sheppard murder in the 50’s that The Fugitive was allegedly based on…and, I guess the Mihaljevic disappearance and subsequent murder in the 80’s…

Wait…why do we live here? Oh yeah, the schools are excellent!

(Kidding, I love our town!)

Author's note: There wasn't any further news of the incident this morning, so I will assume they were answering someones home alarm that was on vacation. Or maybe just playing "cops and robbers" with Rocky River PD.