Burglars Get Away With the Goods Despite Neighbor’s Call to Police : Theft: Because the victims’ home is just outside the Escondido city limits, police did not respond to a robbery report; instead, they referred the caller to county sheriff’s deputies.

While a neighbor watched, Bob and Fran Stinner’s home in rural Escondido overlooking Lake Hodges was systematically looted of five television sets, a videotape recorder, one amplifier, two .22-caliber rifles and a ceremonial Navy sword with Bob Stinner’s name engraved on it.

The neighbor, who lived only a few hundred feet from the Stinners, immediately called police as she kept an eye on the thieves who were loading their loot into a van at the back of the Stinners’ house. But, Escondido police would not respond because the Stinners’ home is just outside the Escondido city limits.

Instead, they advised the caller to notify county sheriff’s deputies. And, by the time the deputies arrived, about 19 minutes after they received the call, the robbers had gone.

“I cannot understand why they would not have responded,” Fran Stinner said Wednesday, speaking of Escondido police. “The county sheriff’s deputies respond to anyplace where they are needed. How could the police have known that I wasn’t here, hiding in a closet or something?”

An Escondido Police Department spokeswoman said Wednesday that the department policy is to respond to calls only within the city limits unless assistance is requested from another law enforcement agency.

“I don’t know whether the Escondido police know it or not, but they could have caught those men if they had simply blocked the entrance to our street,” Stinner said. “And they could have stayed within the city limits and done it.”

Stinner explained that the neighbors on the hillside street--Vista Lago Terrace--”always felt a little bit safer because there is only one way into our neighborhood. You have to go up and come back down the same way.”

But the daylight burglary of their home has changed all that.

“We’ve lived here for six years. And, I guess I will never feel safe again.”

Sheriff’s Sgt. Glenn Revell said, “It’s not unusual for response to that neighborhood to take 15 to 25 minutes.”

The two deputies who were first on the scene came from the San Marcos area, he said, because the deputy assigned to the rural Escondido area was having car trouble.

The sheriff’s unit assigned to the unincorporated areas around Escondido “has a tremendous area to cover,” he said, and the Vista substation is “down 19 uniformed officers” because of the Persian Gulf War and the economic crisis in county government.

Revell speculated that Escondido police might have gotten a “bum rap” in publicity about their failure to respond to the report of a burglary in progress “if the caller didn’t make it clear what was going on, and just reported a suspicious car and some people in her neighbors’ yard.”

Escondido Police Lt. John Wilson said department policy is to refer all calls outside the city limits to the Sheriff’s Department.

“We’re not exactly sitting around here waiting for something to happen,” Wilson explained. “There are usually three or four calls stacked up, waiting to be answered, and we do not think it’s fair to Escondido residents to put their calls down to the bottom of the list for a call in another jurisdiction.”

Wilson said exceptions are made, “depending on the nature of the call,” when city police would respond outside the city limits if “lives or property were in imminent danger.”

Jack Wikoff, a neighbor of the Stinners, said: “This isn’t the first problem like that we’ve had around here, and it probably won’t be the last.

“I guess the only answer for us is a Neighborhood Watch group or a vigilante posse.”

Wikoff knows the problems that come with living just outside an incorporated area. “There was a time there when the (Escondido) city fire engines wouldn’t respond to a fire out here, although they had a mutual aid pact with the county. But I guess that they have that settled now.”

About a year and a half ago, Wikoff had a terrifying experience when burglars broke into his home “and came right in my bedroom. It woke me up.”

He knew that the Sheriff’s Department was the place to call, and he did. Then he waited, “standing there with a gun in my hand,” until the sheriff’s deputies arrived about half an hour later. But the would-be burglars did not wait. They were gone.

Wikoff can sympathize with the outrage that the Stinners feel at the failure of the nearby police to respond, but he understands that “that’s how it is when you are outside the boundaries.”

“We’re a very close-knit neighborhood here, and we’re very concerned about this,” Wikoff said. “We all feel violated by it.”