By Michael Klein
From The Philadelphia Inquirer

The weather’s nice and tables are filling up once again on sidewalks, streeteries, and patios. All smiles and happiness. Well, almost all smiles and happiness. Let’s take a moment for a quick refresher about safety. Stuff happens, unfortunately everywhere.

Most crimes involving restaurant patrons involve theft — a handbag snatched from the back of a chair or a phone lifted from a jacket pocket.

The following tips are mostly common sense. Some are from lessons learned.

Not every thief works by skulking around. Consider Stacey Shapiro’s tale. She was sitting at a table when a passerby, acting intoxicated, walked up to her. Holding out her phone, the person asked Shapiro to give her friend directions to the restaurant. “Being a nice person and not thinking, I took her phone and explained to the person on the other end. Unbeknownst to me, [the “drunk passerby”] was stealing my wallet.” The thief got Shapiro’s wallet and relieved her of her credit cards and ID, she said. Not her Costco card, she noted.

“I canceled my [credit] card before she tried spending $500 at CVS,” Shapiro said. “I got the notification it was declined.”

“All because I was trying to be a nice person,” she said.

On the plus side, management reviewed the video footage, she said, and sent her a $200 gift card.

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