Trash was everywhere, but I don't know whether they had anything to do with it. Barlow chatted with them a bit and we left. Well, he said, so many people have cell phones these days, and they call in things they see. Sometimes they call without really having gotten a good look. Maybe that had happened.
Cell phones are a mixed blessing from the police point of view.
Not infrequently someone with a cell will be the first to see, say, a bad accident on the highway. The call saves lives. In one incident that I was part of, a driver in Arlington actually tracked a criminal's at a safe distance until the police got there. But you get false alarms too. We drove to Sursum Corda, a project that produces a lot of calls for such things as drugs and shootings.