Officers Trained in Use of System to Track Stolen Cars : LoJack: The Glendale department received one free tracking computer from the firm and has asked the city to buy five more.

Five Glendale police officers and a sergeant took an imaginary trip to Gotham City Tuesday, using a Batmanlike electronic tracking system to hunt down an officer playing a villain in a stolen car.

Glendale is one of 47 police departments in Los Angeles County to adopt the LoJack system, a product of Massachusetts-based LoJack Corp. Using special tracking computers installed in patrol cars, police can follow a signal emitted by an electronic device hidden in the stolen car.

Car owners will be able to buy the device from LoJack for $595 when it goes on the market in two weeks. It is about the size of a blackboard eraser, small enough to be hidden in any of 35 different places in a car.

To ensure that all of Los Angeles County would be part of the LoJack system, the corporation donated $1.7 million worth of tracking equipment to police departments, said Robert Montoya, the LoJack representative who trained the Glendale officers. Two cities in the county, Culver City and Long Beach, have decided not to use the system.

The Glendale department received one free tracking computer from LoJack and has asked the city to buy five more. LoJack, which donated at least one computer to each department, sells them for a break-even price of $1,750, Montoya said.

At an indoor briefing before the road training Tuesday, Montoya emphasized to Glendale officers that their road skills still would be paramount in recovering stolen cars, even with the tracking computer, which is installed in the patrol car. The stolen car’s signal can bounce off obstructions such as tall buildings and hillsides, he said. In the exercise, an officer with a homing device in a patrol car hid in a carport. The tracking officers detected the car’s signal more than a mile away and located the car.

Glendale Officer Herbert Cantwell, one of the officers who tested the system Tuesday, said the device will cut down on the time it takes to find a car.

The LoJack “takes a little getting used to, but it actually worked out really well,” Cantwell said. “It bounces a little bit around the buildings, through the downtown area, but once you know what the faults are, it works as a good police tracking device.”

When a car is stolen in Glendale, the chances of it showing up within a day are pretty slim, Cantwell said. If it is found, usually about a week later, often it has been stripped of some of its parts, especially the radio and cassette player.

Out of 1,672 Glendale cars stolen last year, 1,243, or 74%, were recovered in some form, said Glendale police crime analyst Jack Altounian. Only 191 of the thefts, or 11%, resulted in arrests, Altounian said.

LoJack Corp. promises that its system will help police find stolen cars within 24 hours, Montoya said.

“That means it’s not being stripped and vandalized,” he said. The LoJack system also may increase arrests of car thieves, Cantwell said.

LoJack technicians will drive to homes, businesses and 25 Glendale authorized car dealerships to install the device for buyers. It is hooked up to the car’s battery, but remains dormant until activated by signals from law enforcement computers if a car is reported stolen. The device can use its own three-day power source if the battery connection is cut.

LoJack guarantees that its hidden device will result in a recovered car within 24 hours, or the customer gets a full refund.

Glendale police officers at the briefing said they were concerned that car owners with higher expectations than before of getting their stolen cars back will bombard the department with phone calls once the LoJack system is working.

“We’ll need a batphone,” one of them said.