Holiday Reminders & Safety Tips from the Palo Alto Police Department

Learn about ways to be alert and stay safe while shopping this holiday season

City of Palo Alto

Published in

PaloAltoConnect

5 min readDec 7, 2021

By Police Chief Robert Jonsen, Palo Alto Police Department

Recent retail crime, “smash-and-grab” shoplifts, auto burglaries and other related type of crimes have many in our community understandably feeling anxious and concerned. The following communication provides updates on what the Palo Alto Police Department is doing to curb these types of crimes during the holidays, and ways the community can help everyone stay safe.

This holiday season, the Palo Alto Police Department has stepped up patrols around all of our retail areas, even adding additional staffing to focus on keeping shoppers safe. We work closely with our retail centers, small businesses, and other regional law enforcement to identify issues and investigate incidents that occur. We also have communicated on a few incidents to inform the public about these types of crimes.

Read about these incidents here:

For links to all news releases from the Palo Alto Police Department, visit www.cityofpaloalto.org/PAPDnews.

Community Safety Year-Round

The community can help in many ways to keep your family and neighbors safe both now and year-round. Here are some recommended safety tips that are good reminders as community members are out and about this holiday season.

Three basic rules to remember year-round:

Stay alert: pay attention to your surroundings, be aware of what is going on around you and leave cell phones in your purse or pocket while walking.
Be calm and confident: stand tall, walk purposefully, and make quick eye contact with people around you.
Trust your instincts: if a place or situation makes you uncomfortable, leave.

Retail Shopping Safety Tips

On behalf of the Palo Alto Police Department, please be an extra set of eyes and ears for us by promptly reporting suspicious behavior to our 24-hour dispatch center at (650) 329–2413 or 9–1–1 if it’s an emergency.

While you are out shopping this holiday season, follow these helpful tips.

Do not leave purchases unattended in your car. Carry them with you as you go from store to store (bring a family member or friend to help — the more the merrier, right?), or make single trips between a retailer and home to unload purchases. Do not even put purchases out of sight in your trunk; criminals have been known to hang out in parking lots watching for precisely this behavior, and once you leave for the next store, they’ll smash your car window, hit the trunk release, and steal your belongings. Auto burglary is a common crime in every retail area in the Bay Area, and thieves count on shoppers leaving valuables in their cars.

Carry your handbag close to your body and keep a firm grip on it. Carry a wallet in an inside coat or side trouser pocket, not in a rear trouser pocket.

If you suspect you are being followed by someone on foot, walk quickly or run to a nearby store to call the police. If you are really scared, scream for help. If you are being followed by someone in a car, change direction immediately and make a visible point of writing down the license number or car description, or using your cell phone to take a picture or video of the car.

Online Shopping Safety Tips

Many of us do online shopping these days. Prevent packages from being stolen off your porch through the following steps:

Sign up for delivery alerts (text messages or e-mails) from the shipper. Retrieve them from your porch as soon as they are delivered; if you are not home, call a trusted neighbor when the packages are delivered and ask them to pick up the packages for safekeeping until you get home.
Have packages delivered to a place where they can be received in person, such as the home of a trusted neighbor, if you will not be home.
Request a specific delivery date and time from the shipper when you know you will be home.
Provide delivery instructions to the shipper so that packages can be left at a safe location at your home that is out of sight from the street.
If you are still going into the office, and if your employer will allow it, have packages delivered there instead.
Depending on your vendor of choice, there may be other options for secure delivery. For example, Amazon.com has an option for purchases made on their website for delivery to one of their “Amazon Lockers,” a secure site at a local convenience store. There are three Amazon Locker locations in Palo Alto. To find one near you, visit the Amazon Locker locator website.

If you become the victim of package theft, please report that to us. If you do not have any suspect information, please complete a theft report online by visiting our File a Police Report page. If you have suspect information (like surveillance video footage of the thief, for example), please call our 24-hour dispatch center at (650) 329–2413.

Be Informed & Stay Connected

In order to keep informed of major incidents happening in Palo Alto, consider signing up to follow the Police Department on social media, receiving e-mails for news releases and critical public safety information, and subscribing to the City’s alerts to stay abreast of the latest emergency information.

For more information, and for links to all of these free services, visit our Social Media Connections page.

Sign up to receive alerts directly from Palo Alto Police Department by signing up for Nixle.

For many more crime prevention tips, visit our website at www.cityofpaloalto.org/StopCrime.

For the Palo Alto Police Department Public Information Portal, visit www.cityofpaloalto.org/PAPDinfo.

Happy Holidays From the Palo Alto Police Department

A strong partnership between our community and the Palo Alto Police Department will help us collectively keep Palo Alto safe. Thank you for the role you play in that important partnership.

On behalf of the employees of the Palo Alto Police Department, we wish you a safe and happy holiday season.