SEATTLE — When his North Seattle neighborhood became plagued with thieves stealing packages from porches, one man decided to make a very loud statement against a seemingly endless stream of "porch pirates."
He rigged up bait Amazon and FedEx packages with a device that fires two shotgun shell primers and sends an explosively loud and smoky, but physically harmless, message when the packages are moved.
As an experiment, he set the bait packages on his porch for four consecutive nights, and every night, a porch pirate took the bait, which triggered the boom.
"Nobody gets hurt, but it does interrupt your thought pattern and alerts the reptile part of the brain that says, 'This is wrong,"' he explained.
“The issue is about the police response, or more accurately, nonresponse,” he said. “The influx of criminals and the general lawlessness of the criminal element here. It is about individual property rights and the rule of law.”
And, he admits, everyone who watches the videos of the porch pirates’ thefts being interrupted in shock laughs out loud.
“It’s very satisfying,” he said.