Ninety-two people in Richmond, Virginia woke up this week to the same discovery: a windshield in pieces on the pavement. The story making the rounds is about the man police say did it, armed, according to witnesses, with nothing more sophisticated than a handful of bricks. That is not the interesting part. The interesting part is what happens to those cars next, and how differently their owners are about to be treated by the same insurance system, for reasons that have nothing to do with what happened to them on Tuesday morning.
Richmond Police say a man walked through a parking area near East Grace and Ambler Streets in the Shockoe Bottom neighborhood Tuesday morning and, using bricks, worked his way down entire rows of parked cars. One witness told WTVR that as officers photographed the damage, she learned some were left in the windows, the bricks still sitting in the frames where they landed. Officers arrived around 11:16 a.m. and took a suspect into custody without incident. Richmond Police and VCU Police are still trying to identify and contact all of the owners.
That is the news. Here is the story: a modern windshield is not really glass anymore. It is a sensor housing that happens to be transparent. Depending on which of those roughly ninety cars got hit, and which box its owner checked on an insurance form years ago, this brick-throwing spree is going to cost some people forty dollars and other people well over a thousand, for damage that looks identical from the parking lot…