Security is Everyone's Business

When I was young, I remember going to my father's office at one of the military bases where we were stationed and seeing a poster which said "Security is Everyone's Business". It was the 70s, so there was probably a "Hang in there, baby" cat poster alongside it, but I don't recall.

I was reminded of that security poster today by this New York Post story (via Instapundit):

He's a criminal, but he "did the right thing" when it mattered - alerting cops to what he feared was a terror plot the day before the Fourth of July.

At about 5 p.m. yesterday, an unidentified thief with a police record broke into a red van that had been parked at 53rd Street and Second Avenue in Brooklyn's Sunset Park for about a month, a source told The Post.

He was stunned when he looked inside - it was filled with gas cans and Styrofoam cups containing a mysterious white substance with protruding wires and switches.

The street is lined with brownstones, and there's a ballet studio and a small Muslim school. So he drove the van 15 blocks to 37th Street and parked it at a desolate waterfront location behind the Costco store and next to some little-used piers.

Then he got out and called a cop he knows from his run-ins with the law.

"He did the right thing," a high-ranking officer said. "And he possibly saved a lot of people's lives."

It's certainly a heartwarming, faith-affirming story. It's just too bad that when this patriotic car thief needed a store where he could park his explosives-filled van, the nearest Wal-Mart was ten miles away, all the way over in New Jersey.