Unless you have spent time in law enforcement, there are certain signs of crime that you would never notice as a result of your sheltered existence. However, there are important crime signals that every park owner should know, but that nobody will tell you due to political correctness. So here they are:

Shoes don’t grow on power lines.

Have you ever noticed a pair of tennis shoes hanging from a power line? That is the universal sign for “drugs sold here”. When someone is wanting to buy drugs in the mobile home park, they look for the hanging tennis shoes. In really bad parks, you will see tennis shoes hanging from power lines on every street in the park.

Real tears don’t have dark blue outlines.

Have you ever seen a tenant with teardrop tattoos coming out of their eyes and going down their face?  Those are jail-house tattoos, and every tear drop represents a family member who died while they were serving time in prison. A guy with ten teardrops means he was probably in jail for murder, since 10 family members died while he was in there. Or maybe he was in jail ten times and one family member died during each term. Any way you cut it, teardrop tattoos are bad news for tenant quality. You should be very wary around this type of clientele.

Real tattoo parlors have some type of quality control.

Have you seen folks with incredibly amateurish tattoos covering there entire backs, necks, arms and chests. These are jail-house tattoos. With nothing else to do, they give each other tattoos. Think the artwork is bad? Check out the verbage. They need to teach more grammar courses in jail.

Tenants standing out in front of their homes are seldom admiring them.

In parks with a lot of drug activity, you will see tenants milling about in the street in front of their homes. Sometimes, they will just be standing there with their hands in their pockets for hours. They are selling drugs to cars that pass by. Those weren’t star maps they were exchanging for cash.

Those bright lights beaming out of the shed are not a Mickey Rooney drama production.

Often, driving through a park at night, you will see very bright lights beaming out of the cracks around doors and windows (there’s aluminum foil over the windows). What’s that all about? It’s called a “grow-lab”. They grow marijuana in sheds (and sometimes homes) using lights so bright they replicate the sun. These homes will have incredibly high electric usage – and it’s not from the A/C.

Nobody can be that popular.

Do you have a tenant that has an endless line of cars driving to his house and then quickly leaving? No, he is not just a party animal – he’s dealing drugs.

Real teeth don’t look like toothpicks.

Have you ever met a tenant with teeth that look like little slivers? That’s a side effect of someone taking “crank”, a very strong, illegal drug. When you meet a tenant who has teeth that look like toothpicks, and is very fidgety, you have met a crank addict.

That smell is not from cooking – not exactly, anyway.

Have you ever encountered a really bad smell in a mobile home park, but you’re sure it’s not from a rotting body or a sewer leak? That may be the smell of a drug lab manufacturing meth. It has a nasty, burnt trash smell. Maybe I’m wrong – maybe they just burned the turkey while basting it in gasoline.

With some tenants, the answer is “all of the above”.

When you find a tenant or home has one of the above attributes, you will often notice that many more apply. You see the tennis shoes on the power line. Then later that day, you smell a terrible smell coming from the house, and notice the tenant hanging out in the street. He has tear-drop tattoos on his face, and lousy tattoos on his back. And when he smiles, you notice that his teeth look like jail bars. Yep, you’ve got a crime problem on your hands.

Conclusion

It’s not fair to profile people. But there are certain signs of past bad behavior, and current bad behavior, that you have to be vigilant over. When you experience some of the items mentioned above, it might just be coincidence. Or maybe they have served their time and are now respectable members of society.

Or just maybe you are the landlord to the next John Dillinger.