Thefts From Cars: Police Seek to Put on the Brakes : Task Force Takes to the Streets to Battle What One LAPD Official Calls a ‘Plague’ of Crimes

Before the seven-man task force left Central Station on East 6th Street to go to the stakeout scene, Deputy Police Chief Clyde Cronkhite made a prediction--the plainclothes team headed by Detective Russ Suggs would make an arrest in about 90 minutes.

Cronkhite was wrong.

It took exactly five minutes for them to make two arrests. Exactly 32 minutes later, two more suspects were in custody.

The first two suspects were booked on suspicion of “BFMV”--cop shorthand for burglary from a motor vehicle. The other two were booked on suspicion of “TFMV Grand”-- grand theft from a motor vehicle.

But because these crimes are so common, there were no headlines, no TV-teasers.

“It’s not a sexy crime,” Cronkhite said. “It’s one that’s become so big that it goes unnoticed. . . . But I refer to it as a plague--it has reached that stage. It is eroding the quality of life downtown, hitting individual customers (of downtown businesses) and employees who work downtown.”

As of Sept. 1, according to Cronkhite, there had been a total of 6,758 auto-related crimes this year in the Central Area (roughly what the public calls downtown Los Angeles).

More than 40% of all major crimes committed in the city of Los Angeles are vehicle-related--and in the Central Area the figure rises to nearly 50%, according to Cronkhite.

Cronkhite, head of the Police Department’s Operations Central Bureau since last March, considers auto-related crimes the most critical problem faced by his agency today. He believes that the thefts are largely the work of drug users who sell the stolen goods to feed their habits.

And he also believes that task force operations, such as the one carried out by Suggs and his team, are useful short-term tactics.

Between Jan. 1 and Oct. 1, 1984, there were 580 arrests for vehicle-related crimes in the Central Area. In the same period this year, there have been 762--a 31% increase. Cronkhite attributes about one-third of that increase to special task force operations.

This is how the operation went down:

Suggs, a 21-year veteran of the department, briefs his men in Central Station at 12:30 on a Wednesday afternoon.

By 1 p.m. everyone is in place. Suggs, with a two-way Rover radio in hand, has clambered up to the third floor of a building on East 4th Street with a commanding view of the scene below. He explains to Steve Freedman, owner of Dead End Kidds, a leather goods manufacturing firm occupying the third floor loft, what the mission is. Freedman readily agrees to let Suggs use the vantage point to direct the operation.

Plainclothes officers, also equipped with Rover radios, are positioned inconspicuously within sprinting distance of the white 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass that is being used as the decoy car.

The Olds, with a new videocassette recorder and a VCR camera worth $800 sitting in plain view on the back seat, is parked on East 4th Street near the alley called Wall Street. The passenger side window is rolled down about four inches.

The idea is that a thief, or team of thieves, will spot the VCR equipment, reach in through the window, grab the goods--and get collared for “TFMV Grand.”

It didn’t work exactly that way.

Suspicious People

Directly across 4th Street is Joe’s Auto Park, a self-parking lot. While Suggs is focused on the decoy car, Alfredo Valdez, shipping manager of the leather company, spots two suspicious-looking characters wandering into the parking lot and stopping behind a pickup truck fitted with a white camper shell. Valdez alerts Suggs, who in turn uses his radio to alert Officers Kenneth Brower and Doyle Baker.

The two men are walking toward the sidewalk--one with a red vinyl bag taken from the pickup--but before they get there, Brower and Baker grab the pair, the red bag and the 12-inch screwdriver they have just used to jimmy open the pickup window. The time is 1:05 p.m.

Thirty minutes later, four men are casing the decoy car. Two walk to the corner about 50 feet away, apparently to act as decoys.

A third moves to the window of the decoy Olds, reaches in and opens the door. A fourth man moves to his companion’s side to help him carry the loot.

Four plainclothes officers--Eddie Badillo, John Cordova, Greg Miller and Gary Lopez--dash out of their hiding spots, take all four men into custody and recover the VCR equipment. The time is 1:37 p.m.

Two Released

The two supposed lookout men are released--there is no direct evidence of their role in the crime.

While all this is going on, William and Marie Parker, tourists from Hutchinson, Kan., return to their recently burgled pickup truck in the parking lot. Officers tell them what has happened. Identifying their belongings (assorted jewelry, clothing and souvenirs worth about $2,200) later in the booking room at Central Station, the Parkers are full of praise for the police.

“They’re just super!” Marie Parker enthuses. “My,” says her husband, “it couldn’t have been no better.”

In the long run, according to Deputy Chief Cronkhite, changes in the state Penal Code and in the Municipal Code must be made to cut down significantly on auto-related crimes.

A start was made last August when Cronkhite submitted to the Police Commission a set of proposed changes in the Municipal Code covering commercial parking lot security.

There are 500 licensed commercial parking lots in downtown Los Angeles. Cronkhite says that 41% of auto-related crimes occur on these lots.

Among other things, the proposal would require installation of raised attendant booths with windows on all sides; make it illegal to leave keys in cars on parking lots; require installation of self-closing locked key cabinets in attendant lots; require parking lot attendants to be trained in parking lot security; require multilevel parking structures to provide at least one roving security guard, and require coin-operated parking lots to employ an attendant when necessary to prevent theft.

The proposed amendments have been given preliminary approval by the commission and passed along to the City Council’s Intergovernmental Relations Committee, which has yet to put the proposals on its agenda.

Both the Central City Assn. of Los Angeles and the California Parking Lot Assn. support the amendments “in principle,” but spokesmen for the two organizations say they are awaiting council hearings before formally backing them. The Central City Assn. has expressed concerns about how costly the changes would be, and the parking lot group wants to know more about how and by whom the attendants would be trained.