has launched their annual campaign encouraging people to watch out for criminals during the holiday season, and they seem to have brought in an extremely low budget Grinch from Wish.com to do so.
In a release sent out this week the organization described a stunt they engineered where "The Grinch" (quotations theirs) appeared on the doorstep of a home in Cloverdale, only to be greeted and thwarted by the smiling Executive Director of Crime Stoppers Metro Vancouver, Linda Annis.
The release included a photo of "The Grinch," which you can see here is clearly not Jim Carrey in movie makeup, but a dude wearing a fiscally-responsible plastic mask and a one-piece Santa suit with green leggings attached.
Annis noted that the stunt was meant to “make a point about how anyone can help prevent theft at Christmastime,” explaining that “With so much online shopping these days, it’s easy for someone to quickly snatch packages sitting too long at your door. We’ve all seen videos of it, so it’s important to watch for porch pirates who follow delivery trucks and steal packages within minutes of delivery. Preventing theft is largely common sense, and we hope our list of Christmas crime prevention tips will help. It’s just a matter of putting it into action."
She then encourages people who see crimes being committed to call 911 or the local police, and that if you want to report anonymously you can send your tip to Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS or on the website.
Every year around this time you can expect the local news media to be filled with tired Grinch references in relation to crime, self-inflicted (headlines calling criminals Grinches) and otherwise (stunts like this one here).
The beauty of Crime Stoppers "The Grinch" is that they've managed to break through the noise of all the other Seussian content (the VPD also launched some today), on the limited budget that their charity organization has to work with.
In fact it's because of that limited budget that they managed to crack the code and get this column's writer to pause, chuckle at a photograph, then write a few hundred words about their effort.
Live, laugh, stop crime.
