Grant,
That's the justice system in America. In general, drug related offenses carry a much heavier penalty compare to equal or greater crimes. So next time you manage to get thieves arrested, better hope they happen to have some weed on them. I'm surpised by how quickly the police responded to your call. In most major cities, they don't consider break-ins to be worthy of their time. My last car was broken into twice. Once in Portland and once during my 2 years in San Francisco. A friend had his Eclipse broken into twice within a year. Not a single officer responded in each of those incidents. One of those incidents, the thieves left behind five very good finger prints and several drops of blood. The police was not interested at all. They sent me a form in the mail and that was about it.
It doesn't look like your VX sustained too much damage. I should post pictures of my last car after it was broken into for the second time. Not counting all the items lost and damages to the interior, I had to replace the entire front end of the car... hood, fender, grill, headlights, etc. The repairs were expensive enough I'm surprised my insurance didn't opt to total it. Could've bought a new car for what the repairs added up to in the end.
Community garages are the worst when it comes to security. All of the break-ins mentioned above took place in such garages. They could very well have been inside jobs. It was also very difficult to keep the shared garage secure since some neighbors were quite careless about leaving the door open or ajar. Once the thieves were inside they had plenty of time to do their work since their activities were pretty well hidden from passers-by on the street. Looking back, I probably would've been better off parking on the street where street traffic passing by and exposure would have reduced the amount of time these low-lifes had to break into my car.
One thing I have learned, and I'm sure you have too, is to never leave anything in the car... not even a piece of clothing. After my break-ins, I learned to make a point of leaving the car bare. I took time to reveal to the crooks that there was nothing to steal... like removing the rear hatch carpet to show that there weren't any stereo systems installed in the spare well. On top of that I also installed a overly redundant Clifford alarm system to make it as time consuming as possible to break-in. At the time of the break-in I did have a pretty good Clifford system, but because my car was on the lower level of a underground garage, they were able to defeat the system without fear of being discovered (tore up the front end of the car and cut the battery cable). So... no alarm system can be completely theft-proof, but the harder you make it for them... the safer you are. The DEI ESP series and Compustar systems have integrated pagers which allows you to montior your vehicle from a distance of up to a quarter mile. If I were to get an alarm system, it'd be one of those. They're expensive... but gotta pay to play I suppose.
Anyway... best way to protect yourself is to try to think like a crook... time is their best friend/worst enemy.
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