Buzz Lightyear Becomes a Hero Thanks to GPS Tracking
16 Apr 2015Buzz Lightyear becomes a real hero when the toy helps track down thieves of local charity donation bins.
In Atlanta, the Mid-Atlantic Clothing (MAC) Recycling center has noticed a severe drop in donations over the past several months. They have several donation bins around Atlanta, in places like shopping centers and churches. People bring clothing, toys, and other items to donate to the organization by placing them in these bins. Unfortunately, donations are up, but the items in the bins are still going down.
What’s up with that?
The territory manager of donations, Tim Peck, told reporters of the issue with their donations:
“Our donations were down, and down a lot, as much as 35 percent. It’s tens of thousands of dollars if not more. It’s a lot of money.”
They believed the severe drop in donations was because of items being stolen from the donation bins. There are often bags of clothing and toys left in the bins overnight, which is when there is little security in the surrounding areas and puts their bins at risk. An experienced thief can easily get into these bins and remove items to later sell on their own. It has become a major problem not just for this organization, but many other recycling bin drop-off locations in Atlanta.
Since they believed that theft must be the cause of such a considerable drop, they decided to incorporate global positioning systems technology with a GPS tracking devices hidden in several different items included in the collection bins.
A stuffed Buzz Lightyear toy was one of the items with a hidden tracker, and happened to be the one that helped catch the thieves.
The GPS tracker works by detecting movement of the item and sending an alert via text to a connected smartphone, which, in this case, was Peck’s cell phone. One night, he got an alert saying the item was being moved from a collection bin location in Douglasville, Georgia. He promptly called the Douglasville Police, who sent officers to the location where the tracker was telling them to go.
Police were led to a garage in Douglasville, which had a truck backed into it and a man by the name of Everette Barton unloading items into the garage. Police said it looked as if he was sorting all of the stolen items. Barton was arrested on the spot and all of the stolen donations were returned to the charity organization.
Peck also mentioned there being around 100 other GPS trackers, so they hope that they either catch more criminals, or this arrest deters other criminals from attempting the theft. Surprisingly enough, even after this first arrest, his GPS trackers have found competing organizations stealing items from his donation bins and putting items in their company truck. Hopefully thieves catch wind of the arrests and don’t bother attempting another theft.
Comments are closed.