California Car Thieves Still Doing Their Part to Encourage Walking

Where is a parked car not a parked car? The answer is California, where your vehicle will magically transform into an empty spot with a scattering of window glass on the pavement.

The National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) just released its 2015 vehicle theft Hot Spots report, and the Golden State gets top billing, with eight of its cities listed in the top 10.

Modesto, California takes the gold medal for car theft, with a per capita rate of 756 thefts per 100,000 people. Bakersfield, Salinas and San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward also placed in the top five. The two non-California cities in the top 10 were Albuquerque, New Mexico (second place, with 733 thefts per 100,000) and Pueblo, Colorado (seventh place, up from 24th last year).

The other California hot spots were Stockton-Lodi, Merced, Riverside, San Bernadino-Ontario, and Vellejo-Fairfield. While the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim area had the most total vehicle thefts (57,247), the area’s sizable population kept it out of the top 10 when the crimes were measured on a per capita basis.

If you’re looking for somewhere to live where the only dangers to your car are falling nuts, hail, rust and depreciation, head to Altoona, Pennsylvania. That city recorded a per capita rate of 30 thefts per 100,000 people. Next in line in the safe zone were New York cities Glen Falls, Watertown-Fort Drum, and Kingston. Harrisonburg, Virginia placed fifth safest with a rate of 32.79 thefts per 100,000.

According to FBI statistics, vehicle thefts rose one percent over the first half of 2015. The NICB recommends drivers use four layers of defense when parking their car, with the first layer being common sense — that’s the thing you use when you decide not to park the Civic under the overpass, next to the broken streetlight, with the windows rolled down and the keys in the ignition.

Don’t be that guy.

The other layers include warning, immobilizing and tracking devices, though the following anti-theft device can’t be condoned, nor is it supported by existing legislation:

[Image: jon collier/ Flickr]