
Why Stealing Cars Went Out of Fashion - benackles
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/upshot/heres-why-stealing-cars-went-out-of-fashion.html
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leonhandreke
I wish bicycle theft was tackled in a similar fashion. A combination of
factors seems to be at play here: Photo ID required to sell the car and
technological hurdles that are too hard to overcome for small criminals. With
embedded computer chips being so cheap nowadays, surely it should be possible
to embed some sort of tracking system in bicycle frames.

~~~
jzwinck
If you want to reduce bicycle theft in the US, the solution is simple:
drastically increase the penalties for perpetrators. Get caught stealing a
bike? One year in jail. Adjust until the level of theft is where you want it
to be.

Stealing a bike is not just taking $300 or whatever from the owner. It's
robbing that cyclist and would-be cyclists of the confidence to use their
preferred mode of transportation, and deteriorating their health in the long
term. This is a lot more damaging than non-cyclists often intuit, and
insurance cannot cover it. The penalty for stealing bicycles should be closer
to the penalty for stealing a car and intentionally injuring someone.
Currently it's close to zero.

~~~
ejstronge
I understand the motivation behind what you're suggesting but I don't think
jail time is a fair deterrent.

I think (this is anecdata from some bike theft victims, including myself) that
there are folks who steal bikes to ride them, potentially for transportation
to work/school, and those who steal bikes to sell them elsewhere.

We should find a way to deter both groups but putting someone in jail for a
$300 (let's say $600 to cover some of the unintended effects you mention)
probably won't stop the commercial thieves as they'll find other lackeys to do
the theft.

On a more important note, I feel uncomfortable having someone locked up,
costing taxpayer money, for committing a non-violent crime whose damages are
less than two weeks' pay at minimum wage.

~~~
gambiting
I had a bike stolen from me, when someone broke into my back yard(breaking
down the gate), sawed off the railing the bike was attached to and took the
bike together with the railing(the bike was attached with a Kryptonite lock,
which I guess was a lot harder to break than the railing itself). Yeah you're
right, the crime was not violent, and the bike was worth 2x the minimum wage
where I come from, which is not a lot(~800 USD). The gate was also fairly easy
to fix, as was the railing.

But it's not the violence or the financial damage. It was the fact that I
stopped feeling safe in my own house. That the area that I once though was
friendly and safe is now filling me with dread and I was so worried about
living there that year later I had to move out. That every time I heard noises
in the back yard I had to get out of my bed and look out of the window. I
shrugged off the financial loss of my bike very easily - but the physiological
damage was much greater. Now if you asked me if I want the bike thieves to be
put in prison, I would say - absolutely, positively yes. I hate and despise
people who steal and I understand how deeply theft can affect a well being of
a person, regardless of the value of stolen goods.

~~~
jzwinck
I felt exactly the same way after a gang stole a camera lens from my bag while
it was strapped onto my body in Russia. They (3-5 people) surrounded me on a
street in broad daylight, shoved me in various directions, separated my $1000
lens from myself, and ran off. I had a new lens shipped to me in a week, but
the psychological change has lasted for years.

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praptak
_" Stealing cars is harder than it used to be, less lucrative and more likely
to land you in jail. As such, people have found other things to do."_

Interesting. I wonder if there are any studies on what the other things are.
What do perpetrators do when the crime they specialize in no longer pays?

~~~
baddox
I doubt most people desire being a criminal as an end in itself. Presumably
car thieves either went onto the next best job, whether that be a crime (where
"best" considers costs, like the risk of being punished, and benefits), or a
legal job.

~~~
lmm
Or stayed at home and claimed unemployment, if the marginal gain from working
ceased to be worth the cost.

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ilamont
I did a ride-along with a cop outside of Boston about 12 years ago. His car
had a laptop attached to the dashboard, an innovation that only started
appearing in the 1990s. One thing that he was able to do was instantly look up
the plate on a vehicle without having to radio it in -- and the lookup
interfaced with what I assume was an updated database of stolen cars.

Another technological innovation he mentioned was the positive effect of the
Lo-Jack stolen vehicle recovery system
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoJack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoJack)).
It not only instantly sends stolen vehicle information to police systems, but
also activates a beacon on the stolen vehicle which specially equipped
cruisers can detect and follow.

I imagine innovations such as these impacted the theft rate over the past 25
years, and also helped law enforcement agencies identify and arrest serial
offenders responsible for large numbers of thefts. Didn't see it mentioned in
the NYT article, though.

~~~
rmc
I believe police cars in the UK have cameras with automatic number plate
recognition. They drive around and it scans for stolen/uninsured cars.

~~~
jzwinck
Likewise in America and elsewhere: [http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2012/09/your-car-tracked-...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2012/09/your-car-tracked-the-rapid-rise-of-license-plate-readers/)

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robmcm
Not sure it made much of a difference to insurance premiums, unless you didn't
have an immobilizer in which case you premium would go up.

I expect the insurance industry benefited most from this.

~~~
graeme
I don't know why you're only considering insurance premiums. Surely, people
benefit from not having their car stolen. It's a lot of work to replace a car,
even if insurance pays.

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rmason
Why go to all the trouble of breaking into a car and then trying to start it?
Sadly Detroit leads the new trend of car jacking - they even coined the term:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/23/detroit-
carjacking_...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/23/detroit-
carjacking_n_5378508.html)

~~~
Cthulhu_
Probably because the former used to be a relatively simple one-man job that
required just a screwdriver and some basic car mechanic skills to do; the
latter requires some more organisation, a truck, multiple people, etc.

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grahamel
That's interesting because there's been a rise recently in London where people
plug a computer into a car to disable the alarm and start the engine..

[http://www.motors.co.uk/news/security/electronic-car-
theft-o...](http://www.motors.co.uk/news/security/electronic-car-theft-on-the-
rise)

~~~
mike_hearn
Immobilisers have absolutely slaughtered car theft (this is not news, I
referenced this trend in a talk I gave a couple of years ago), but this makes
them VERY vulnerable to being hacked. What's more most immobiliser systems are
poorly engineered from a cryptographic perspective, for example, some can be
overridden by simply telling the ECU to start up via a plugin cable, others
are simply broadcasting static repeating codes meaning you can gather the
codes with a fixed receiver in a car park and then go collect them later.

When a sufficiently smart criminal starts making kits that let you hack
immobilisers, theft of those models shoots up dramatically. BMW has suffered
from this effect badly. Their engine security sucked and owners became magnets
for car theft.

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nextw33k
All these crime is down articles make me think there is something more
fundamental at play. That whilst technology has helped, that perhaps the real
answer is economic.

Crime was a way of getting something that you wanted with little effort but
high risk. However with consumerism we can have what we want with medium
effort and low risk. There is a lower barrier to getting what you want with
anything of material worth.

~~~
kstenerud
Lead was a major contributing factor.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-
ca...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-caused-
americas-violent-crime-epidemic/)

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alexhawdon
Another thing the article doesn't mention but I've heard is now a common
(sorry, nothing to cite) way of stealing cars is to take the keys.

Perhaps it's time for manufacturers to start with 2-factor authentication,
perhaps the key and then a PIN that you have to enter? Is anybody doing this?

~~~
codfrantic
I remember an aftermarket immobiliser which required a PIN to be entered, this
was in the Netherlands in the 1990's though, haven't seen it since...

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alec_heif
Interesting that the Honda Accord and Honda Civic are (or rather, were) the
two most stolen cars. Is that because Hondas are more reliable (so there's
more old Hondas on the road) or because they're easier to steal?

~~~
AmVess
They are stolen for the marketability of their parts.

~~~
nyrina
That still begs the question. Why are their parts better?

~~~
nostrademons
Hondas are known for their reliability. If you don't crash it or trade it in,
a Honda can easily go 200-300,000 miles and last for 20+ years. #3 and #4 on
the "most stolen cars list" are the Toyota Camry and Corolla, which are the
other cars most known for their reliability.

If you're looking to steal a car built before 1997 (17 years ago), there are
relatively few other makes that are still on the road. Cars from American
automakers rarely make it past 100,000 miles (about 10 years of normal
driving) in workable condition; there are simply fewer cars out there to
steal.

~~~
yason
That sounds awfully low for American automakers. What exactly happens at
100,000 miles?

Generally cars will go through their first big part replacement cycle between
60-100k, these are wearing parts that come to an end at that age. That can
cost a couple of thousands but that's just part of normal maintenance and will
be 10x cheaper than buying a new car. These Hondas and Corollas sure as hell
go through this phase and the next replacement cycle happens maybe another
100k later.

It's my impression that even these cheap little cars in Europe (such as Fiat
Punto) can easily go 200,000 miles if only serviced so 100k sounds a bit odd.
I've also assumed that the appeal to American cars with their big blocks is
because they're built to last and eat hundreds of thousands of miles; this
assumption might be outdated, however.

~~~
akadruid1
The 100,000 mile cliff is disappearing now. Build quality of American cars
rose rapidly in the mid-2000s - for example, Ford repair rate declined nearly
50 percent between 2004 and 2009[1].

I remember reading somewhere that this was driven by accounting improvements
that arose from the Enron scandal but I can't find the source now.

[1] [http://www.leftlanenews.com/ford-reduces-warranty-costs-
by-1...](http://www.leftlanenews.com/ford-reduces-warranty-costs-by-12b.html)

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amolgupta
Car theifs might now be busy stealing smartphones. Easier done with better
insentives maybe.

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dutchbrit
Funny - it's pretty easy to steal new BMW's these days!

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Lennington
In Dublin Ireland it's actually getting way more popular.

~~~
masklinn
More popular or more visible?

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amalag
Damn I need to lock up my 1996 Honda Accord!

------
rasz_pl
30x less stolen cars in New York? Im sure Police car crime department got
reduced in size, right?

RIGHT?

~~~
Piskvorrr
Didn't actually read the article, did you?

"And the decline in thefts has freed up the 85 detectives and supervisors of
New York’s auto crime division to focus on stopping organized car theft rings,
the sorts of operations that actually have the ability to make coded keys for
newer cars."

~~~
shutupalready
So those 85 detectives and supervisors, formerly working on auto crime, now
work on auto crime -- a subset of auto crime to be precise.

The grandparent's comment has merit. Government has stayed exactly the same
size.

~~~
Piskvorrr
...while working on something with larger impact, apparently. Is the _size_ of
the government the only indicator of efficiency?

~~~
PeterisP
The point is that if previously they had, say, 85 people with 30 working on
organized car theft rings and 55 on random single thefts; then a reasonable
result of a tenfold decrease in random thefts would NOT be 80 people on
organized car theft rings and 5 on random single thefts but instead 40 on the
organized crime (if it has increased), 5 on the random thefts, and 40 people
moved away from the car crime, either to something different within the police
or laid off to make budget for other useful things such as medicine or public
transportation.

Demand for various niches of gov't service will change, that's a given. When
it's not enough, bad stuff is visible, voters complain and service gets
increased. What happens when the demand falls, as it has in this case? We need
an ability to reduce the size as well.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Fair point.

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f00644
'You wouldn't download a car' <\- hell yes I would!

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kalleboo
Is this native advertising?

> One of the factors that keeps car theft going in the United States is the
> reliability of old Hondas. Eventually, mid-1990s sedans should become too
> old to be worth stealing at all, but that hasn’t happened yet. “They keep
> running,” said Mr. Morris, and therefore they keep being stolen.

~~~
Cthulhu_
To be honest, "our cars are very reliable but they're likely to get stolen"
isn't very good advertising, :p.

~~~
Ma8ee
But "our cars are very reliable and no longer very likely to get stolen" is.

